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Copyright © 2019 by Ted Gioia

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姓名：Gioia，Ted，作家。

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标题：音乐：颠覆性的历史/特德·乔亚。

Title: Music : a subversive history / Ted Gioia.

描述：第一版。| 纽约：Basic Books，2019 年。| 包括参考书目和索引。

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标识符：LCCN 2019001627 | ISBN 9781541644366（精装：碱性纸）| ISBN 9781541617971（电子书）

Identifiers: LCCN 2019001627 | ISBN 9781541644366 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781541617971 (ebook)

主题：LCSH：音乐——社会方面——历史。| 音乐——政治方面——历史。

Subjects: LCSH: Music--Social aspects--History. | Music--Political aspects--History.

分类：LCC ML3916 .G59 2019 | DDC 780.9--dc23

Classification: LCC ML3916 .G59 2019 | DDC 780.9--dc23

LC 记录可访问 https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001627

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001627

ISBN：978-1-5416-4436-6（精装本），978-1-5416-1797-1（电子书）

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4436-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-1797-1 (ebook)

E3-20190830-JV-NF-ORI

E3-20190830-JV-NF-ORI

2

2

爱乐乐团的食肉动物

Carnivores at the Philharmonic

如果不将人类音乐置于其生态系统中，我们就无法理解其最初的萌芽。乐器本身起源于食物链。管乐器——例如前文提到的尼安德特人用熊股骨制成的笛子——源自猎物的骨骼。兽皮被制成鼓。而最初的“角”实际上是动物的角，这是大卫诗篇中提到的古老传统，至今仍在犹太新年和赎罪日吹奏羊角号（或称羊角）时保留下来。动物的力量如今融入音乐之中，但这仅仅是因为动物被驯服的躯体被物理地挪用了。

We cannot begin to grasp the first stirrings of human music without placing it within its ecosystem. The instruments themselves began as part of the food chain. Wind instruments—such as the aforementioned Neanderthal flute, constructed from a bear’s femur—came from the bones of prey. Hides got made into drums. And the first ‘horns’ were literally animal horns, an ancient tradition mentioned in the Psalms of David and preserved even today in the blowing of the shofar, or ram’s horn, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The power of the animal now resided in the music, but only because of this physical appropriation of its subdued body.

当这些乐器并非来自死去的动物时，它们就从用来杀死它的武器进化而来。我们最早的弦乐器是猎弓：它的结构只是逐渐发生变化，使其更适合演奏音乐而非屠杀。即使是对传统狩猎社会中出现的竖琴进行简单的目视观察，也能揭示其与武器的联系——“就像有人把弓拉直了，”民族音乐学家埃里克·查里写道，“又加了几根弦。”同样的棍棒和石头，用来追逐中的死亡也能成为打击乐的源泉。血腥与音乐随处可见，展现出它们之间的密切联系^。1

And when the instruments didn’t come from the dead animal, they evolved from the weapons used to kill it. Our earliest stringed instrument was the hunter’s bow: only gradually did its structure change to make it more suitable for music-making than slaughter. Even a simple visual inspection of harps from traditional hunting societies reveals the connection with weaponry—“as if someone had straightened the bow,” writes ethnomusicologist Eric Charry, “and added a few more strings.” The same sticks and stones that dealt death in the chase could also serve as sources of percussion. Everywhere bloodshed and music showed their intimate connections.¹

法国作家帕斯卡尔·基尼亚尔在他那本发人深省的著作《对音乐的仇恨》中提醒我们： “在《伊利亚特》中，基萨拉琴并非西塔拉琴（一种七弦琴，也是我们吉他的前身）：它仍然是一把弓。”当阿波罗携弓出现时，你可能会欣赏到一场音乐表演，也可能会被杀死。同样，在《奥德赛》的结尾，当奥德修斯绷紧弓弦准备杀死求婚者时，荷马明确地将他比作一位正在调音的音乐家。对于现代听众来说，这两个领域——音乐表演和杀戮——似乎毫无关联，但对我们的祖先来说，它们却常常交织在一起^。2

“In the Iliad, the kithara is not a cithara [a lyre, and the forerunner of our guitar]: it is still a bow,” French writer Pascal Quignard reminds us in his provocative book The Hatred of Music. When Apollo shows up with his bow, you may be treated to a musical performance—or you might be killed. By the same token, when Odysseus tightens his bow in preparation for murdering the suitors at the conclusion of the Odyssey, Homer explicitly compares him to a musician tuning an instrument. For the modern listener, these two spheres—musical performance and killing—seem to have nothing in common, but for our ancestors, they frequently overlapped.²

拉弓的那一刻乍一看意义不明。它储存了潜在的能量以备后用——但它将如何被运用，是用于美丽还是用于屠杀？我注意到，荷马在《奥德赛》最具戏剧性的一幕中毫不留情地杀死了求婚者，但奥德修斯却允许一个人毫发无损地离开：为受害者演奏的乐师。我不禁想到，荷马在那位幸存于屠杀的吟游诗人身上看到了自己的影子。

That moment of bending the bow is ambiguous at first glance. It stores potential energy for later use—but how will it be applied, for beauty or for massacre? I note that Homer shows no mercy in killing off the suitors in the most dramatic scene in the Odyssey, but Odysseus does allow one person to leave the premises unscathed: the musician who had performed songs for the victims. I can’t help thinking that Homer saw something of himself in that singing bard who survives the carnage.

在人类历史的某个时期，大规模杀伤性武器主要成为大众娱乐的工具——或许公元前五世纪希腊艺术中性别角色的显著转变——女性取代男性成为弦乐器的主要演奏者——为我们提供了这一转变的大致时间框架。狩猎弓和音乐弓之间的这种交叠在非洲、南美洲和大洋洲都有迹可循。最终，这种乐器演化出更方便演奏音乐的功能，而不再仅仅作为武器。《以赛亚书》中对和平时期的描述经常被引用：剑被锻造成新的犁铧形状，长矛变成了修枝钩。但让我们充分赞扬同样充满诗意的杀戮之弓转化为令人心动的吉他。

At a certain point in human history, weapons of mass destruction became primarily instruments of mass entertainment—perhaps the striking sex-role shift in fifth century BC Greek art, when women replaced men as the primary performers of stringed instruments, gives us an approximate time frame for this transition. This overlap between the hunting bow and the musical bow has been traced in Africa, South America, and Oceania. Eventually the instrument evolves in ways to facilitate music-making, and becomes worthless as a weapon. The Book of Isaiah offers an oft-cited description of peaceful times: the sword is beaten into the new shape of a ploughshare and the spear turned into a pruning hook. But let’s give full credit to the equally poetic transformation of the killing bow into the thrilling guitar.

然而，音乐表演与武器的这种联系从未完全消失。现存的一份要求清单中世纪德国的吟游诗人对音乐家有一项特殊的要求，那就是要懂得“像剑客一样出色地表演”，以及其他一些奇特的技能（吟游诗人还必须“知道如何扔出小苹果并用刀尖接住它们；模仿鸟儿的歌声，用纸牌表演魔术，以及跳铁环”）。即使在今天，我仍然觉得奇怪的是，我经常在新闻中读到有人被乐器袭击的文章。我最喜欢的故事与布鲁斯音乐家约翰·李·胡克有关，他的长期伴侣莫德·马西斯从底特律一路开车到托莱多，在舞台上与她反复无常的情人对峙。她从他手中夺过吉他，砸在他的头上。胡克后来说，他很高兴在演出中演奏的是空心原声吉他，而不是实心莱斯·保罗吉他。在现代，就像在古代一样，选择错误的乐器可能事关生死^。3

Yet this association of musical performance with weaponry never completely disappears. A surviving list of requirements for minstrels in medieval Germany includes the peculiar demand that the musician know how “to acquit himself well as a swordsman,” along with other odd skills (the minstrel must also “know how to throw up little apples and to catch them on the point of a knife; to imitate the songs of birds, perform tricks with cards and jump through hoops”). Even today, I find it odd how often I read articles in the news about someone getting assaulted by a musical instrument. My favorite story relates to blues musician John Lee Hooker, whose longtime companion Maude Mathis drove all the way from Detroit to Toledo to confront her fickle lover onstage. She grabbed the guitar from his hands and slammed it on his head. Hooker later said he was glad he was playing a hollow-body acoustic and not his solid-body Les Paul at the gig. In modern times, as in antiquity, choice of the wrong instrument could be a matter of life or death.³

即使是所有音乐机构中最受尊敬的交响乐团，其DNA中也蕴含着狩猎的传承。乐团中的各种乐器都可以追溯到这些原始的起源——它们最早的前身要么是用动物的角、兽皮、肠衣、骨头制成的，要么是用驯服动物的武器制成的（棍棒、弓）。我们从音乐本身，从那些至今仍是世界顶级乐团核心曲目的不朽交响曲中，从它们那令人敬畏的侵略性和令人敬畏的自信中，感受到这段历史，难道我们错了吗？聆听贝多芬、勃拉姆斯、马勒、布鲁克纳、柏辽兹、柴可夫斯基、肖斯塔科维奇和其他经典作曲家的作品，我很容易就能想象出一群人开始狩猎的画面，他们用声音作为统治的源泉和象征，表达掠夺意志（尽管肖斯塔科维奇的作品有时很难分辨他是在延续这一传统还是仅仅在讽刺它）。

Even the most respectable of all musical institutions, the symphony orchestra, carries inside its DNA this legacy of the hunt. The various instruments in the orchestra can be traced back to these primitive origins—their earliest predecessors were made either from the animal (horn, hide, gut, bone) or the weapons employed in subduing the animal (stick, bow). Are we wrong to hear this history in the music itself, in the formidable aggression and awe-inspiring assertiveness of those monumental symphonies that remain the core repertoire of the world’s leading orchestras? Listening to Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Bruckner, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and other canonic composers, I can easily summon up images of bands of men embarking on the hunt, using sound as a source and symbol of dominance, an expression of the will to predatory power (although, with Shostakovich, it is sometimes hard to tell whether he is extending that tradition or merely satirizing it).

我指的不仅仅是西方古典音乐曲目中狩猎主题的具体运用，尽管值得思考的是，这些主题在西方古典音乐中占据了多么重要的地位——例如，在马勒的《第一交响曲》中，在布鲁克纳的《第四交响曲》中，在海顿的众多作品中，或在莫扎特丰富的管弦乐作品中。勃拉姆斯实际上在很小的时候就学会了如何演奏无阀狩猎号角——由他的父亲教给他——并且他一直对它怀有深厚的喜爱。他后来为它谱曲，正是因为它的声音。但比这些声音和主题更引人注目的是无处不在的、充满宣言意味的部落主义，它似乎推动着这些作品不断向前发展。我有时会想，交响乐在其盛行时期如此轻易地拥抱民族主义的冲动，是否正是因为这种可以追溯到我们祖先的音乐生活的悠久血统，才使得它更容易被接受。毕竟，在所有浪漫主义艺术形式中，交响乐难道不是最具民族主义色彩的吗？绘画、诗歌或小说能比得上它所展现的部落热情吗？

I’m not referring merely to the specific use of hunting themes in the Western classical music repertory, although it’s worth considering how often these come to the forefront—for example, in Mahler’s First Symphony, or Bruckner’s Fourth, or at various places in Haydn, or Mozart’s prolific orchestral output. Brahms, for his part, actually learned how to play the valveless hunting horn as a youngster—his father taught him—and he retained such fondness for its sound that he later composed music for it. But even more striking than these sounds and motifs is the pervasive declamatory tribalism that seems to propel these works forward. I sometimes wonder whether the ease with which the symphony embraced the impulses of nationalism during its period of ascendancy wasn’t made all the easier by this long lineage going back to the musical lives of our prey-seeking ancestors. After all, wasn’t the symphony the most nationalistic of all the Romanticist art forms? Could painting, poetry, or fiction ever match its tribal fervor?

如果仅从乐器的角度来判断，你可能会得出这样的结论：管弦乐队是用原始餐桌上的残羹剩饭或祭祀后剩下的残羹剩饭搭建起来的。只有簧片乐器才可能出现在素食社群中。其他大多数乐器——由角、骨、肠和兽皮制成——应该提醒我们，我们的歌曲，就像音乐家本身一样，都源自食肉动物。这就是我们在爱乐乐团举办的盛大晚会背后的血腥历史。

If you only judged matters from the musical instruments, you might conclude that orchestras were built out of the remnants of the primitive dinner table or the leftovers of a sacrificial killing. Only the reed instruments might have appeared in a vegetarian community. Most other instruments—of horn, bone, gut, and hide—should remind us that our songs, like the musicians themselves, are descended from carnivores. Such is the bloody history behind our stately evenings at the philharmonic.

即使在今天，古典音乐仍然享有盛誉，作为一种领土主张的工具，不仅对国家如此，对小得多的领地也同样如此。早在1985年，一位7-Eleven便利店的经理发现莫扎特和贝多芬的音乐在驱散停车场流浪汉和乞丐方面很有价值，此后大约150家其他加盟店也开始用扬声器播放古典音乐。如今，这种做法十分普遍。执法机构、交通部门和企业主用它来驱赶公共场所不受欢迎的人群，从犯罪团伙到无家可归者，不一而足。西棕榈滩警方在一个毒贩出没的街区测试了这种技巧，“警员们惊讶地发现，晚上10点钟街角空无一人，”警探迪娜·金伯林说。 “我们和街上的人们交谈，他们说，‘我们不喜欢那种音乐。’”很快，他们就开始处理其他警察部门的请求，询问如何实施类似的项目，以及哪些古典音乐被证明是最有效的。或许最奇怪的例子是，特斯拉首席执行官埃隆·马斯克在2019年初宣布，他的公司正在测试一款汽车安全系统，该系统会以高音演奏巴赫的《D小调托卡塔与赋格曲》。^{当劫匪试图撬开汽车时，音量会变得很大。各种案例研究表明，巴赫、莫扎特和贝多芬的音乐在确立地盘统治方面具有特殊的功效，但在犯罪学领域，先锋派也找到了一席之地，最引人注目的是2018年的一项实验，该实验旨在用现代无调性音乐驱散柏林火车站的毒贩。}音乐界许多人抱怨这些措施——柏林的项目甚至因艺术机构对文化武器化的批评而被取消——但很少有人声称这些措施无效。4

Even today, classical music enjoys a widespread reputation as a tool of territorial assertion, not just for nations but for far lesser domains as well. Back in 1985, after a 7-Eleven manager discovered the value of Mozart and Beethoven in dispersing vagrants and panhandlers from the parking lot, around 150 other franchisees started blasting classical music through loudspeakers. Today, this practice is widespread. Law enforcement agencies, transit authorities, and business owners use it to repel unwanted parties, ranging from criminal gangs to the homeless, from public spaces. When West Palm Beach police tested this technique in a neighborhood infested by drug dealers, “the officers were amazed when at 10 o’clock at night there was not a soul on the corner,” according to detective Dena Kimberlin. “We talked to people on the street, and they said, ‘We don’t like that kind of music.’” Soon they were fielding requests from other police departments on how to implement a similar program, and which classical works had proven most effective. In perhaps the strangest example of all, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced in early 2019 his company’s test of a car security system that plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor at high volume when a robber tries to break into an automobile. The various case studies suggest that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven possess a special efficacy in establishing territorial dominance, but in the world of criminology, the avant-garde also finds a place, most notably in a 2018 experiment to dispel drug dealers from a Berlin train station with modern atonal music. Many in the music community complain about these measures—the Berlin program was even canceled in response to criticisms from arts organizations about the weaponization of culture—but few go so far as to claim that they don’t work.⁴

音乐学家很少深入探讨音乐与战争之间的联系，或管弦乐表演中的部落元素。他们当然知道，军事组织似乎总是拥有乐队，尽管这种投入的规模可能会让他们感到惊讶。美国支持130支军乐队，在军乐上的投入是国家艺术基金会投入的三倍。这使得军乐成为整个政府对艺术表演的最大一笔投入。这在大多数观察家看来或许有些稀奇，或者或许是政府浪费的典型例子。然而，正如我们将在下文中看到的，音乐在其悠久的历史中始终与侵略性的部落行为息息相关，无论是狩猎、战争、罢工、政治抗议，还是仅仅是体育比赛。（除了体育赛事之外，人们唯一能找到机构对现场乐队音乐进行大规模投资的地方，这绝非巧合。）

Musicologists rarely dwell on the connection between music and war, or on the tribal elements of an orchestral performance. They are aware, of course, that military organizations always seem to have bands, although the scope of this investment might surprise them. The United States supports 130 military bands, spending three times as much on military music as on the National Endowment for the Arts. This makes military music the single largest commitment to artistic performance in the entire government. That may seem like a curio to most observers, or perhaps a prime example of government waste. Yet music throughout its long history, as we shall see in the pages ahead, has always had a close relationship with aggressive tribal behavior, whether the hunt, warfare, labor strikes, political protests, or just athletic contests. (It’s hardly a coincidence that the only other place one finds large institutional investment in live band music is at sporting events.)

故事最奇妙之处就在于此：即使音乐本身并不表达出某种部落忠诚，歌迷们也会创造这种忠诚。看看重金属、乡村、嘻哈、朋克或其他任何音乐类型的爱好者如何将他们的音乐品味作为群体认同的源泉，并通过最强烈的团结和忠诚来表达。这在其他文化领域根本不会发生。你永远不会看到，比如说，推理小说或填字游戏的爱好者们，在音乐活动中与参加者的热情紧密相连。音乐本身就足以成为部落忠诚的基石。

And here’s the strangest part of the story: even when music doesn’t express a tribal allegiance, the fans create it. Just watch how devotees of heavy metal, country, hip-hop, punk, or any other genre employ their musical tastes as a source of group identity, expressed with the most intense demonstrations of solidarity and loyalty. This simply doesn’t happen in other cultural arenas. You never see aficionados of, say, mystery stories or crossword puzzles bonding together with the fervor of attendees at a musical event. The music itself serves as sufficient cause for tribal loyalty.

这是有充分理由的。正如我们在第一章中看到的，当我们表演或听音乐时，我们的身体会释放激素催产素会让我们更加信任周围的人。正因如此，音乐在与爱人共度的浪漫夜晚中往往扮演着如此重要的角色。歌曲实际上可以充当粘合剂，将情侣紧紧联系在一起。在音乐表演中，甚至我们的身体节奏也会与周围的节奏同步。脑电波会根据音乐的节奏进行调整，呼吸和脉搏也是如此——研究人员发现，“歌手的心跳会同时加速和减速”。我们的心跳可能真的同步，就像那句老话所说的那样。但这其中肯定还有其他进化因素在起作用。我们的DNA似乎天生就倾向于像鸟类和其他生物一样，用歌声来保护自己的地盘，而且音乐可能还在解决所谓的“搭便车问题”中发挥作用。搭便车问题是指个体决定让群体中的其他人去做辛苦的工作（无论是打架、耕作还是其他一些对群体生存至关重要的任务），而自己则袖手旁观，逃避竞争。歌曲通过协调参与者的身心，将个人与手头的任务紧密联系在一起。然而，最后一个纯粹务实的考量解释了为什么音乐常常成为群体形成和凝聚力的工具，即它的普遍性。当美国第一批工会组织工人们聚集在一起唱歌时，这种策略与音乐欣赏或娱乐无关，而是源于他们意识到当时的工人阶级包含来自许多非英语国家的移民。这些工人中的许多人受教育程度有限，对美国本土语言的了解更是匮乏。因此，一场演讲或一本小册子或许无法触动他们，但一首歌却能激起他们的情感，激发他们对更宏大事业的忠诚^。5

There are good reasons for this. As we saw in Chapter 1, when we perform or listen to music, our bodies release the hormone oxytocin, which makes us more trusting of the people around us. That’s why music often plays such an important role in a romantic evening with a loved one. Songs can actually serve as a kind of glue bonding a couple together. Even our body rhythms become synchronized with those around us during a musical performance. Brainwaves adjust to the rhythm of the music, as does respiration and pulse—“the hearts of the singers accelerate and decelerate simultaneously,” researchers have determined. Our hearts may literally beat as one, as in the old cliché. But there must be other evolutionary factors at play here as well. Not only does our DNA seem hardwired with a tendency to use song as a tool in protecting our turf, just as birds and other creatures do, but music may also play a role in solving the so-called free-rider problem, which occurs when individuals decide to let others in the group do the hard work (whether fighting, farming, or some other task essential for group survival), while they sit on the sidelines and avoid the struggle. By synchronizing the bodies and spirits of the participants, songs bind individuals to the task at hand. Yet a final, and purely pragmatic, consideration explains why music so often serves as a tool in group formation and cohesion, namely, its universality. When the first US labor unions brought workers together to sing songs, the tactic had little to do with music appreciation or entertainment, but came from a realization that the working class at the time contained immigrants from many nations where English was not the native language. Many of these workers had limited education and even less knowledge of the American vernacular. For this reason, a speech or pamphlet might not influence them, but a song could stir their emotions and inspire their allegiance to the larger cause.⁵

我们甚至有一个词来形容那些能建立忠诚和凝聚力的歌曲：圣歌。但或许所有歌曲在某种程度上都是圣歌，每首歌都将我们与更大的群体联系在一起，即使这个群体只不过是摇滚音乐会上的其他人，或是迪斯科舞厅里的舞伴。

We even have a word for a song that creates loyalty and bonding: it is an anthem. But perhaps all songs are anthems, to some degree, each tying us to the larger tribe, even if that tribe is nothing more than other people at a rock concert or dance partners at a disco.

上述每个因素在早期狩猎社会的音乐生活中都扮演着关键角色，但这些背景中还涉及另一个因素，这个因素如今已被人们遗忘，或许被认为太过尴尬，不便提及。我指的是传统社会中存在着一种强烈而持久的信念——有些人甚至称之为迷信——认为音乐拥有某种魔力。演奏第一批乐器的人明白，他们仍在引导着作为其原材料的自然力量和生物的力量。动物的力量仍然栖息在鼓、号和笛子之中。

Each of these factors played a key role in the musical lives of early hunting societies, but another element was also involved in these settings, one that is largely forgotten nowadays, or perhaps considered too embarrassing to mention. I am referring to the powerful and persistent belief in traditional societies—some might call it a superstition—that music possesses a kind of magic. Those who played the first musical instruments understood that they continued to channel the power of the natural forces and organisms that had served as their raw materials. The animal still resided in the drum and horn and flute.

当今，许多（或许是大多数）听众很少理解音乐与其有机起源之间的联系。我经常让学生困惑，因为我要求他们辨别是什么创造了他们在唱片中听到的声音——是萨克斯管？小号？合成器？还是样本？他们只是耸耸肩，答不出来。我们大多数人已经失去了以这种方式聆听歌曲的能力。音乐已成为一种抽象的艺术，人们消费它时仿佛它就是纯粹的声音，与物理对象的领域和生活于世的过程脱节。表演已经演变成一个音轨，一个文件，不是由有血有肉的人创造的，而是由压缩数据创造的。然而，即使在数字时代，培养更深层次的聆听方式也不仅仅是一种听力训练的教学练习；它开辟了进入音乐内在生命的切入点。如果我们甚至无法识别该仪器，我们如何能够希望理解这些物体曾经为其使用者所拥有的自然力量，或者——一个更加难以实现的目标——为我们自己重新获得这些力量？

In the current day, many (perhaps most) listeners have little grasp of the connection between music and its organic origins. I often flummox students by asking them to identify what is creating the sound they hear on a record—is it a saxophone? a trumpet? a synthesizer? a sample? They simply shrug their shoulders, unable to answer. Most of us have lost the ability to listen to songs in this way. Music has become an abstract art, consumed as though it existed as pure sound, disconnected from the realm of physical objects and the process of living-in-the-world. The performance has evolved into a track, a file, created not by flesh-and-blood humans but by compressed data. Yet even in a digital age, cultivating a deeper way of hearing is more than a pedagogical exercise in ear training; it opens up an entry point into the inner life of music. If we can’t even identify the instrument, how can we hope to comprehend the natural forces that these objects once possessed for their users, or—an even more elusive goal—recapture those powers for ourselves?

它们能被重新捕获吗？感恩而死乐队的鼓手米奇·哈特在夏令营中以一种非常规的方式强迫他的学生们对鼓的隐藏力量产生一种不安的理解。他决定让他们自己制作乐器——这个过程比任何人预想的都要充满焦虑和困难。那么，如何制作自己的鼓呢？第一步是：获得一张两岁小公牛的皮。“这句话读起来很简单，”哈特后来评论道，“但它甚至无法表达出一块60磅重的公牛皮的真实面目，它滴着血，上面还粘着大块的脂肪。”在数字音乐的世界里，这是最终的模拟真相——那些学生永远不会忘记的真相。笛子可以抚慰人心，鼓可以活跃气氛，但血和内脏与它们的起源，甚至可能与它们的功效有着千丝万缕的联系^。6

Can they be recaptured? Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart forced his students at a summer camp into a queasy understanding of the hidden power of the drum in an unconventional way. He decided they would construct their own musical instruments—a process that was much more fraught with anxiety and difficulty than any of them expected. And how do you make your own drum? Here’s the opening step: Obtain the hide of two-year-old steer. “That’s a simple sentence to read,” Hart later observed, “but it doesn’t even begin to convey the reality of a sixty-pound hunk of steerhide, dripping with blood, with big gobs of fat still clinging to it.” In a world of digital music, this was the ultimate analog truth—one those students would never forget. The flute may soothe and the drum may enliven, but blood and guts are inextricably linked to their origins, perhaps even to their efficacy.⁶

“乐器”一词本身就蕴含着深刻的启示，它不仅指一种发声的装置，更指一种适应和生存的工具。早期人类社会中的音乐不仅汲取周围的环境，更试图驯服和改造它。歌曲和乐器都是力量和权威的源泉，是扭转生存之战平衡的手段。对于我们的祖先来说，音乐或许是愉悦和喜悦的源泉，但它同样也是一种掌控的形式，一种征服自然的力量。

The very word “instrument” is revealing, signifying not just a sound-making device, but a tool for adaptation and survival. Music in early human societies not only drew on the surrounding habitat, but attempted to tame and transform it. Both song and instrument were sources of power and authority, means for tilting the balance in the battle for survival. For our forebears, music may well have been a source of pleasure and delight, but it was equally a form of mastery, a force for subduing nature.

我们能否找到一个交汇点，让这种生存的声音工具首次在艺术和表达上产生共鸣，成为音乐作为人类文化平台的起点？值得注意的是，文化史学家阿诺德·豪泽在其巨著《视觉艺术社会史》中，从法国南部令人瞩目的旧石器时代洞穴壁画入手。这些壁画中栩栩如生的动物形象——仅在拉斯科洞穴群中就描绘了近千种动物——自发现以来就令观者惊叹不已。奇妙的是，我们对人类音乐起源的探索也带我们来到了同一个地方，并发现了音乐与绘画早期历史之间引人入胜的联系。

Can we identify a moment of intersection where this sonic tool of survival first took on a resonance of artistry and expression, a starting point for music as a platform for human culture? It’s worth noting that cultural historian Arnold Hauser begins his magisterial multivolume study of the social history of visual art with the remarkable Paleolithic cave paintings in the south of France, where the vivid realism of the animal images—almost one thousand creatures are depicted in just the Lascaux cave complex—has startled onlookers since their discovery. Oddly enough, our search for the origins of human music takes us to this same locale, where we find intriguing connections between the early history of music and painting.

20 世纪 80 年代，研究人员惊讶地发现，这些史前图像位于洞穴中共振最强的部分。中世纪晚期欧洲教堂声学专家伊戈尔·雷兹尼科夫 (Iegor Reznikoff) 养成了在进入封闭空间时哼唱的习惯，以此来判断周围环境的听觉特性。1983 年，他在访问法国勒波特尔 (Le Portel) 的洞穴时惊讶地发现，当他进入动物壁画附近时，声音明显变得更清晰、更响亮。随后在该地区 10 个不同洞穴的研究证实了他的假设：这些图像的放置位置至少部分是由声学因素决定的。他和其他研究人员一次又一次地发现了这种意想不到的关联。在阿列日省尼奥 (Niaux)、勃艮第省阿尔西叙屈尔 (Arcy-sur-Cure) 以及其他地方的洞穴中，声音特性和视觉图像之间的相同联系最终被记录下来。不仅声音最洪亮的部分洞穴是绘画爱好者的首选，但绘画的密度与共振水平成正比。在一些狭窄的隧道里，小到必须爬行才能通过，那里没有发现任何绘画，但在洞穴壁上，恰好在共振最大的位置上，人们画下了红色的标记——这表明原始居民正在绘制他们住所的声学图。在其他情况下，绘画出现在声学特性使得旁观者能够轻松地用声音模仿所描绘动物声音的位置^。7

Here researchers in the 1980s were startled to learn that these prehistoric images were located in the parts of these caves with the greatest resonance. Iegor Reznikoff, an expert in the acoustics of European churches of the late Middle Ages, had developed a habit of humming when he entered enclosed spaces in order to gauge the aural properties of his surroundings. He was startled during his 1983 visit to the caves in Le Portel in France to find the sound grew markedly clearer and louder when he came into the vicinity of the animal paintings. Subsequent research at ten different caves in the region confirmed his hypothesis: that the placement of these images must have been determined, at least in part, by acoustical considerations. Again and again, he and other researchers encountered this unexpected correlation. In the caves of Niaux in Ariège, Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy, and elsewhere, the same linkage between sound properties and visual images was eventually documented. Not only were the most sonorous parts of the caves preferred for illustrations, but the density of painted images was directly proportional to the level of resonance. In some narrow tunnels, so small that one must crawl to move through them, no paintings were found, but red marks were placed on the cave walls at precisely the points of maximum resonance—suggesting that the primitive inhabitants were mapping the acoustics of their shelter. In other instances, paintings appeared at locations where the acoustical properties made it easy for onlookers to mimic with their voices the sounds of the animals depicted.⁷

我们的结论是不可避免的：这些洞穴的早期居民一定聚集在图像周围吟诵或歌唱。史蒂文·埃雷德将这些想象中的旧石器时代表演称为“世界上第一批‘摇滚’音乐会”。我自己对狩猎社会音乐的研究使我相信，歌手们希望获得某种超自然的力量来战胜所描绘的动物，从而将野兽的图腾力量据为己有，确保成功捕获猎物。一些壁画描绘了半人半兽的奇异生物，从而强化了这种神秘力量融合或篡夺的观点。许多动物被描绘成受伤或死亡的样子，这进一步证实了以下假设：洞穴壁画及其演奏的音乐赋予了猎人们在血腥追捕中的力量^。8

Our conclusion is inescapable: the early inhabitants of these caves must have gathered around the images for chanting or singing. Steven Errede has called these imagined Paleolithic performances “the world’s first ‘rock’ concerts.” My own research into the music of hunting societies persuades me that the singers hoped to secure some supernatural advantage over the animals depicted, taking on the beasts’ totemic power for themselves and thus ensuring success in capturing prey. Some of the paintings depict strange creatures—part animal and part human—and thus reinforce this view of a mystical merging or usurpation of powers. The fact that many of the animals are portrayed as wounded or killed further confirms the hypothesis that the cave paintings and the music made in their presence served to empower the hunters in their bloody pursuits.⁸

你的音乐收藏或播放列表中有多少首关于动物的歌曲？你什么意思？一首也没有？你可能觉得，专门为动物创作的音乐“流派”本身就很奇怪。那么故事呢？你最近读过以动物为主角的小说吗？你说没有？但如果我问一个小孩，我会得到截然不同的答案。你可能会对那些混合了人物和动物形象的奇怪洞穴壁画，或者那些歌颂这种融合的歌曲感到困惑，但孩子却能立刻理解它们的意义。

How many songs about animals do you have in your music collection or on your playlists? What’s that you’re saying? You don’t have any? You probably think the very notion of a music ‘genre’ devoted to animals is bizarre. What about stories? Have you read any novels lately with animals as the main protagonist? None, you say? But if I were asking a young child, I’d get a very different response. You might be puzzled by the strange cave paintings that mix human and animal figures, or by songs celebrating this fusion, but a child would grasp their significance immediately.

看看那些最著名的童话、童谣和儿歌，你会发现“动物题材”是最受欢迎的。事实上，这些歌曲和童谣通常被归因于一位名叫鹅妈妈的神秘女性——她是最……文化史上令人费解的人物。即使在今天，学者们也未能就这个人物的起源达成一致，其名字本身就暗示着动物与人类特质的融合，就像洞穴壁画中描绘的生物一样。在本书的后面，我将探讨童话故事的原始来源，并探索它们可能揭示的早期音乐史。但即使你不是民俗学家，也能理解我们今天讲给孩子们听的歌曲和故事，其实是史前时代萨满和狩猎采集者的仪式的再现。

Look at the best-known fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and children’s songs, and you will find that the ‘animal genre’ is the most popular of all. In fact, these songs and rhymes are often attributed to a mysterious woman called Mother Goose—one of the most puzzling figures in cultural history. Even today, scholars can’t quite agree on the origins of this personage, whose very name suggests a merging of animal and human qualities, just like those creatures depicted in the cave paintings. Later in this book, I will look at the primitive sources of fairy tales and explore what they might tell us about the early history of music. But you don’t need to be a folklorist to comprehend that the songs and stories we tell children today re-create the rituals of shamans and hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric age.

萨满可以与动物对话。如今，如果你在寻找能够用动物语言交流的人，你一定会去翻阅儿童故事。作家的作品越受欢迎——苏斯博士、刘易斯·卡罗尔、A.A.米尔恩、碧翠丝·波特、C.S.刘易斯——你就越有可能找到跨物种对话。看看最受青少年喜爱的动画电影，数一数有多少涉及会说话的动物。而那些歌曲——《小蜘蛛》、《咩咩黑羊》、《老麦当劳农场》、《玛丽有只小羊羔》等等——则展现了名副其实的动物精灵大杂烩。你不禁会得出结论：我们都是天生的萨满，尽管社会期望我们长大后能够摆脱这种身份。但在这个成长的过程中，有些东西被遗忘了。“我们人类创造了一个只剩下我们自己和我们创造的器物的世界，”作家厄休拉·勒古恩提醒我们。 “但我们生来并非如此，我们必须教会我们的孩子如何适应这种环境。” 歌曲和故事是对这种经验狭隘化的回应。“我们的孩子必须学会贫困和流放：生活在混凝土墙体上，周围是无尽的人群，偶尔透过铁栅栏看到一头野兽。” ⁹

The shaman could talk with animals. If you were looking today for people who communicated in the language of animals, you would turn to children’s stories. And the more popular the author—Dr. Seuss, Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, C. S. Lewis—the more likely you are to find cross-species dialogue. Look at the most popular animated films among the preteen demographic, and count how many involve talking animals. And the songs—“Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “Old McDonald’s Farm,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and others—present a veritable menagerie of animal spirits. You can’t help concluding that we are all born shamans, although society expects us to grow out of it. But something is lost in this process of growing up. “We human beings have made a world reduced to ourselves and our artifacts,” author Ursula K. Le Guin reminded us. “But we weren’t made for it, and we have to teach our children to live in it.” Songs and stories are a reaction against this narrowing of experience. “Our children must learn poverty and exile: to live on concrete among endless human beings, seeing a beast now and then through bars.”⁹

然而，如果你想理解音乐的起源，你必须改变自己，变得像小孩子一样，正如福音传道者告诉我们的那样。学者米尔恰·伊利亚德写道，原始人与动物之间的关系“本质上是精神性的，具有一种神秘的强度，现代人脱离了神圣的心态很难想象。”例如，在拉斯科，大约有一百幅完整的动物壁画幸存下来，但只有一幅描绘人物的壁画——而且这个人的头是鸟头。另一幅著名的洞穴壁画位于三兄弟洞穴，描绘的是一个男人跳跃，可能处于恍惚状态，头上长着鹿角。头尾悬垂。“即使在今天，我们也看到，”埃利亚德评论道，“萨满巫师仍然相信他们可以把自己变成动物……我们有理由相信，这种神奇的转变导致了一种‘超越自我’的感觉，这种感觉常常在狂喜的体验中得到体现。” ¹⁰

Yet if you want to grasp the origins of music, you must change and become like little children, as the evangelist tells us. The relations between primitive man and animals, writes scholar Mircea Eliade, “are spiritual in nature and of a mystical intensity that a modern, desacralized mentality finds it difficult to imagine.” At Lascaux, for example, around one hundred intact paintings of animals have survived, but only one of a human figure—and that person is depicted with a bird’s head. Another famous cave painting, at Les Trois Frères, shows a man jumping, perhaps in a trance state, with antlers on his head and a tail hanging behind. “We have seen that even today,” Eliade remarks, “shamans believe that they can change themselves into animals.… We have reason to believe that this magical transformation resulted in a ‘going out of the self’ that very often found expression in ecstatic experience.”¹⁰

无论我们身处何方，哪里有狂喜体验，哪里就有音乐。在世界各地，在历史（以及史前时期）的每个阶段，音乐与音乐都协同作用，音乐增强狂喜，狂喜塑造音乐。那些对超验体验持怀疑态度的人试图揭穿和嘲讽声音与灵魂之间的因果关系，他们运用一种务实的经验主义，认为这种经验主义没有给巫师和预言家留下任何回旋余地。“音乐常常被认为拥有引发附身的神秘力量，”民族音乐学家吉尔伯特·鲁热在他那本虽有缺陷却影响深远的著作《音乐与恍惚》中解释道——然后，他又以极其大胆的概括性陈述补充道：“这种假设毫无根据。”鲁热更愿意将这些事件视为戏剧表演或神经发作，当然不会将其视为通往“改变意识状态”的音乐之路（他嘲笑这个短语“根本不是一个概念”）^。11

And wherever we find ecstatic experience, we also find music. In every part of the world, at every stage of history (and prehistory), the two come together synergistically, the music heightening the ecstasy, and the ecstasy shaping the music. Those suspicious of transcendental experiences have tried to debunk and ridicule the causative chain between sound and spirit, applying a hardheaded empiricism that, they believe, leaves no wiggle room for shamans and seers. “Music has often been thought of as endowed with the mysterious power of triggering possession,” ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget explains in his flawed but influential book Music and Trance—then adds, in a sweeping statement of remarkable audacity: “There is no truth whatsoever in this assumption.” Rouget prefers to see these incidents as theatrical performances or nervous fits, and certainly not as demarcating a musical pathway to “altered states of consciousness” (a phrase he derides as “not a concept at all”).¹¹

这难道是真的吗？这些改变的状态是虚假的，通往这些状态的音乐路径是骗局吗？对于那些试图根据务实的经验证据否定音乐的转化力量的人来说，最大的障碍在于，说来也怪，越来越多的经验证据却从我们这些务实的头脑中得出，证明了恰恰相反的观点。研究员安德鲁·内赫（Andrew Neher）于1961年发表了一篇关于节奏和脑电波的开创性文章，改变了音乐理论的规则。这篇文章发表在《脑电图与临床神经生理学》（Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology）上，此前音乐学者们并不认为这是必读期刊。但很快，他们就需要密切关注医学期刊，而这些期刊如今已成为学习音乐创作的令人惊喜的资源。内赫的论文《用头皮电极观察正常受试者的听觉驱动》（Auditory Driving Observed with Scalp Electrodes in Normal Subjects）分享了他对暴露于重复节奏的受试者大脑活动的研究结果。第二年，他又大胆尝试将自己的研究成果应用于民族音乐学，发表了一篇题为《对……的生理学解释》（A Physiological Explanation of）的论文。仪式中涉及鼓的异常行为。”快进到现在，回想一下最近有多少关于音乐的畅销书是由科学家撰写的（我已经引用了一些，但还有很多其他的）。当我们的恍惚怀疑论者 Rouget 与 Neher 争论时，他声称后者是该领域唯一研究的作者——另一个笼统的说法，即使在当时也并不正确——并宣布这样的工作“不幸地缺乏任何科学价值”。但 Rouget 的继承者们有一整套研究资料可以与之抗衡。否认音乐和恍惚之间联系的怀疑论者已经输掉了这场争论；他们没有揭穿萨满的真面目，反而自己被揭穿了^。12

Could this be true? Are these altered states bogus, and the musical pathways to them a fraud? The biggest obstacle for those trying to dismiss the transformational power of music on the basis of hardheaded empirical evidence is, strange to say, a growing body of empirical evidence drawn from our hard heads proving the exact opposite. Researcher Andrew Neher changed the rules of music theory with a pathbreaking 1961 article on rhythms and brainwaves published in Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology—not previously considered a must-read periodical by music scholars. But soon they would need to pay close attention to medical journals, which now became surprising sources of learning on music-making. Neher’s paper, “Auditory Driving Observed with Scalp Electrodes in Normal Subjects,” shared the results of his study of the brain activity of test subjects exposed to repetitive rhythms. He followed it up the next year with a bold attempt to apply his findings to ethnomusicology, in a paper titled “A Physiological Explanation of Unusual Behavior in Ceremonies Involving Drums.” Fast-forward to the present day, and recall how many recent best-selling books on music are written by scientists (I have cited a few already, but there are many others). When Rouget, our trance skeptic, battled with Neher, he claimed that the latter was the author of the only research in the field—another sweeping claim, which wasn’t true even at the time—and announced that such work was “unfortunately devoid of all scientific value.” But Rouget’s heirs have a whole library of research with which to contend. The skeptics who deny the connection between music and trance have simply lost the argument; instead of debunking the shamans, they themselves have been debunked.¹²

事实上，即使是古人也进行过科学研究，将重复的节奏与意识状态的改变联系起来。两千多年前，托勒密发现，当他将一个辐条纺车放在光源前时，重复的视觉模式会让观察者产生欣快感。刺激是视觉的，但原因显然是有节奏的。在动物界也观察到了同样的联系：例如，我们知道黑猩猩会长途跋涉来观看瀑布反射的阳光。如今，神经科学家将这种现象称为同步，这个技术术语指的是脑电波的频率倾向于与外部刺激的重复模式相匹配。内尔发现，重复的声音模式会导致受试者的大脑产生类似的适应性。简而言之，人类有机体会与世界的节奏保持一致，无论是音乐还是视觉。从这个角度来看，萨满的鼓和神秘者的吟唱是实用的技术，是真正的工具，无论在某些观察者看来它们有多么原始，它们都能产生可证明和可重复的结果。

In truth, even the ancients pursued scientific research linking repetitive rhythms to altered states of consciousness. More than two thousand years ago, Ptolemy discovered that when he placed a spoked spinning wheel in front of a light source, the repeating visual pattern produced feelings of euphoria in an observer. The stimulus was visual, but the cause was clearly rhythmic. The same connection has been observed in the animal kingdom: chimpanzees, for example, have been known to travel long distances to watch sunlight reflected off a waterfall. Neuroscientists nowadays call this phenomenon entrainment, the technical term for the tendency of brainwaves to match their frequency to the recurring pattern of an external stimulus. Neher found that repeating sound patterns caused similar adaptations in the brains of test subjects. Put simply, the human organism aligns itself to the rhythms of the world, whether musical or visual. From this perspective, the shaman’s drum and the mystic’s chant are practical technologies, real tools that, however primitive they may seem to some observers, produce demonstrable and repeatable results.

自内尔时代以来，我们对音乐刺激与生物反应之间的因果关系有了更深入的了解。哲学家塔姆·亨特和心理学家乔纳森·斯库勒提出了一种新的意识理论，甚至将节奏视为精神与物质之间神秘的缺失环节。在一个宇宙中，每个主体和客体音乐在振动和震荡，我们对自我的感知和对现实的把握或许都根植于节拍之中。然而，音乐不仅能改变我们的大脑，还能改变我们身体的化学反应。例如，参加鼓圈的参与者，仅仅演奏一小时的音乐后，T细胞数量就会增加，免疫系统也会增强。就连鼓手们也对雷莫公司（Remo）——全球最大的鼓面供应商——竟然成立了健康科学部门感到困惑。一家乐器供应商为何要涉足医学？鼓乐怀疑论者——他们通常不熟悉这方面的科学文献——对这种不协调之处嗤之以鼻。但传统医者的鼓与当今各种医疗工具之间的区别并不像他们想象的那么大，其中许多工具也依赖于节奏和声音特性。事实上，我们了解得越多，就越觉得歌曲不仅仅是人类的创造物，就像许多艺术作品和想象力一样，而是对外部力量的真正引导。如今，声波被用于治疗白内障和肾结石、检测囊肿和肿瘤、治疗肌腱炎和关节炎，有时甚至用于抗癌。我们仍然用“歌曲”来治病，只是我们更喜欢换个名字。晶状体乳化术或碎石术听起来比“治愈之歌”更令人印象深刻，但这些医疗程序完全可以被称为我们日益发展的治疗音乐科学的分支。2016年，加州大学洛杉矶分校的科学家甚至仅凭一个咖啡杯大小的小型“仪器”发出的超声波，就成功唤醒了一名昏迷中的男子。这与古代关于冥界之旅的神话有着惊人的相似之处，在冥界，音乐也被用来使死者复活^。13

Since Neher’s time, we’ve learned a great deal more about the cause-and-effect connection between musical stimulus and biological response. A new theory of consciousness, formulated by philosopher Tam Hunt and psychologist Jonathan Schooler, goes so far as to identify rhythm as the mysterious missing link between mind and matter. In a universe in which every subject and object is vibrating and oscillating, our very sense of self and grasp of reality may be grounded in the beat. Yet music not only changes our brains, but alters our body chemistry as well. Participants in a drum circle, for example, show higher T-cell counts and strengthened immune systems after only one hour of music-making. Even drummers are puzzled to learn that Remo, the largest supplier of drumheads in the world, has established a health science department. Why is a musical instrument supplier dabbling in medicine? Drumming skeptics—who are usually unfamiliar with the scientific literature on the subject—laugh at the incongruity. But there isn’t as big a leap as they might assume between the traditional healer’s drum and various current-day tools of the doctor’s trade, many of which also rely on rhythms and sonic properties. In fact, the more we learn, the more it seems that songs are not just human constructs, as are so many works of art and imagination, but a genuine channeling of an external power. Nowadays sound waves are used to break up cataracts and kidney stones, to detect cysts and tumors, to treat tendonitis and joint inflammation, and sometimes even to fight cancer. We still use ‘songs’ to cure; we just prefer to give them a different name. Phacoemulsification or lithotripsy sound so much more impressive than ‘healing song,’ but these medical procedures could very well be described as branches in our growing science of therapeutic music. In 2016, scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles even managed to wake a man from a coma just through the use of ultrasound, emitted from a small ‘instrument’ about the size of a coffee cup. The similarity with ancient myths about journeys to the underworld, where music is also used to revive the departed, is uncanny.¹³

由于我们的重点是历史，而非生理学，我们必须暂时搁置这个引人入胜的话题。但历史学家确实有一些独特而重要的见解——无论多么细致，都无法将音乐的文化共鸣和美学丰富性简化为“你的大脑在听音乐”的描述。即便如此，当我们回过头来思考音乐在早期狩猎采集社会中的作用时，我们最好承认，生物力量——以及经济、社区、精神和艺术力量——是人类社会的一部分。构成人类音乐创作基础的至关重要的命令结合。

As our focus is on history, not physiology, we must leave this fascinating subject behind. But historians do have something unique and vital to offer here—you cannot reduce the cultural resonance and aesthetic richness of music to descriptions of “your brain on music,” no matter how detailed. Even so, as we return to our consideration of the role of music in the earliest hunter-gatherer societies, we do well to acknowledge biological forces—along with economic, communal, spiritual, and artistic ones—as part of the vital conjunction of imperatives that formed the basis of human music-making.

所有这些元素，即使是“最简单”的史前歌曲，也都发挥着作用。为了公平地对待我们穴居祖先，我们不得不承认，相比之下，我们现代的歌曲几乎完全是为了消遣和娱乐，显得微不足道。在我看来，聚集在这些雕像前的猎人们的歌声，或许可以被视为劳役号子——祈求神力帮助他们追捕猎物。但它们同时也是精神之歌，试图在当下与精神世界之间架起一座桥梁。此外，唱歌或吟唱本身也一定加强了社区成员之间的情感纽带，就像今天的社交合唱一样。这些歌曲中或许也包含了一些教育元素——在传统社会中，核心知识几乎总是以音乐的形式来传达。最后，几乎是事后诸葛亮，我们不得不承认，音乐也具有娱乐性——尽管或许“入迷”和“被吸引”才是更贴切的词。现代歌曲能达到这水平的一半吗？我们最伟大的歌曲作者能否以多种方式与史前前辈相媲美，为社区提供服务？

All these elements are at play in even the ‘simplest’ prehistoric songs. In fairness to our cave-dwelling predecessors, let’s admit that our modern songs, geared almost entirely toward diversion and entertainment, are paltry things by comparison. As I envision them, the songs of the hunters who assembled before these images might well be considered work songs—solicitations for magical powers that would assist them in their pursuit of prey. But they were also spiritual songs, attempting to create a bridge between the here-and-now and the spirit realm. In addition, the very act of singing or chanting must also have strengthened the emotional bonds between the members of the community, much as social sing-alongs do even today. Some pedagogical element may also have figured in these songs—core knowledge is almost always communicated in musical form in traditional societies. And finally, almost as an afterthought, let’s admit that music also entertained—although perhaps entranced and entrained may be better words. Does any modern song achieve half as much? Can even our greatest songwriters match their prehistoric predecessors in the multifaceted ways they served their community?

请注意，我还没有使用“观众”这个词。或许在这些场合中并不存在“观众”，至少不是现代意义上的“观众”。当然，参与者也参与其中——在仪式中总是如此，即使是那些保持沉默的人，也融入了其中，构成了正在展开的事件。相比之下，音乐表演中“观众”的概念对许多传统文化来说却是陌生的。现代娱乐的等级制度将表演者与观众彻底区分开来，但这很少适用于这些场合，在这些场合中，每个人都受邀在某种程度上参与到社区的音乐生活中。在这样的场合中，一呼一应的形式如此普遍绝非巧合，因为它们既源于社会结构，也定义了音乐结构。出于同样的原因，在传统社会中，音乐经常与舞蹈联系在一起——以至于任何试图将一首“歌曲”孤立出来并对其进行评价的尝试，都同样，音乐学家研究贝多芬交响曲的某个乐章也常常是徒劳无功和自欺欺人的。

Note that I haven’t used the word audience yet. Perhaps there wasn’t an audience in these settings, at least not in the modern sense of the term. Certainly there were participants—there always are in rituals, where even those who remain silent are integrated into the proceedings, constitutive of the unfolding events. In contrast, the concept of an ‘audience’ for a musical performance is foreign to many traditional cultures. The hierarchies of modern-day entertainment, which radically separate performer from spectator, rarely apply to these situations, in which everyone is invited to contribute, to some degree, in the musical life of the community. It is hardly a coincidence that call-and-response forms are so common in such settings, because these arise from the social structure as much as they define a musical structure. For this same reason, music is frequently connected to dance in traditional societies—so much so that any attempt to isolate a ‘song’ and assess it in the same way a musicologist studies a movement of a Beethoven symphony is often an exercise in futility and self-deception.

这种参与式的方法肯定定义了狩猎采集文化中的音乐创作，我们可以看到它对历史时期甚至现代的持久影响。西方世界最早有记录的音乐厅是古希腊的odeon——这个名字源于aeidein，意思是“唱歌”。换句话说，odeon 的字面意思是“唱歌的地方”，而不是我们现代的礼堂，后者表示“聆听的地方”。即使在表演者和观众之间必须有明确区分的情况下——例如，在荷马史诗的公开演出中——两者之间的分界线也与我们现代音乐会上的分界线大不相同。柏拉图同名对话中的吟游诗人伊翁提到，他在表演时会哭泣，他可以看到周围的人也在哭泣。苏格拉底的回应是，观众是缪斯激发诗人灵感的链条上的最后一个环节——按照这种解读，表演者仅仅是一个中介。你能想象有哪个评论家会用如此嘲讽的语气来描述流行音乐界的百万富翁巨星吗？

This participative approach must have defined music-making in the hunter-gatherer cultures, and we can see its lingering influence well into historic times, and even in the modern day. The earliest documented concert halls in the Western world were the odeons of ancient Greece—the name derived from aeidein, meaning “to sing.” In other words, the odeon was literally a “singing place,” not an auditorium, our modern equivalent, which signifies a “listening place.” Even in situations where a clear distinction between performer and audience was essential to the proceedings—for example, at public performances of Homer’s epics—the dividing line between the two was very different from that found at our modern-day concerts. The rhapsode Ion, in Plato’s dialogue of the same name, notes that he weeps when he performs, and that he can look out at those around him and see them weeping as well. Socrates responds by insisting that the audience is the last link in a chain that starts with the Muse inspiring the poet—the performer, under this interpretation, serves as a mere intermediary. Can you imagine any pundit describing the millionaire megastars of pop music in such a derisory manner?

“观众”不仅参与了这些仪式，而且必然在此过程中获得了力量。我指的不仅仅是狩猎采集者萨满仪式中隐含的神奇力量，而是某种更可衡量、更可预测的东西：声音赋予那些运用声音的人的实际力量，他们的歌声改变了他们周围的世界——无论是在狩猎准备、组织劳动、为仪式注入庄严和效力，还是在无数其他方面。音乐本身就定义了一种统治与权威的关系，其程度之深，是现代城市居民难以想象的。

The ‘audience’ not only participated in these rituals, but must have been empowered in the process. I’m not talking merely about the magical powers implicit in the shamanic proceedings of hunter-gatherers, but something more measurable, more predictable: the actual power conferred by sound upon those who wield it and whose songs change the world around them—whether in preparing for the hunt, or organizing labor, or infusing ritual with solemnity and efficacy, or in myriad other ways. Music itself defined a relationship of dominion and authority to a degree that a modern city-dweller can hardly imagine.

在电子放大器出现之前的工业化前时期，早期人类及其猎物很少遇到巨大的声音。除了少数例外，比如在雷雨天或大瀑布附近，他们的听觉环境存在着微妙的差异，只有细心的人才能发现其中的宝藏。聆听者。原始猎手可能终其一生都听不到自然界中任何能与他们集体歌唱的音量和力量相媲美的声音，尤其是在共鸣的封闭空间，例如上文描述的那些特殊的洞穴“热点”中。第一批聚集在这些地方唱歌或吟唱的人类一定感受到了巨大的力量。而他们的猎物也一定对回响感到了相应的恐惧。

In those preindustrial times before electronic amplification, early humans and their prey rarely encountered loud sounds. With few exceptions, perhaps when they were in the presence of a thunderstorm or large waterfall, their aural environments were subtly differentiated and yielded their riches only to the careful listener. Primitive hunters could live their entire lives without hearing anything in nature that matched the volume and force of their own collective singing, especially when it took place in a resonant, enclosed place such as those special cave ‘hot spots’ described above. The first humans who gathered in these locations to sing or chant must have felt tremendously empowered by the results. And their prey must have felt a commensurate fear at the reverberations.

此刻，地球上的力量平衡发生了转变——动物们在猎人面前落荒而逃，将领地拱手让给了那些会唱歌的人类定居者。这让我想起了人类学家詹姆斯·伍德伯恩的故事。他带了一位哈扎族猎人来到肯尼亚的一个自然保护区，注意到这位经验丰富的户外爱好者生平第一次近距离目睹野生动物时所展现出的惊讶。这位猎人从未见过如此强大的生物，面对他靠近竟然毫不退缩。他的惊叹证明了动物们适应性地在猎人出现之前听到声音就逃跑，这也提醒我们，在自然状态下，即使是一场音乐表演，尤其是通过集体组织或特殊声学环境放大的音乐表演，也能成为一种领土权利的宣示。如今，一张纸，也就是所谓的所有权证书，赋予了我们对自身财产的支配权；而在更早的时代，它或许只是一首歌而已^。14

The power balance on our planet shifted at this moment—the animals now fleeing before the hunter, ceding territory to the song-equipped human settlers. I am reminded of the story of anthropologist James Woodburn, who brought a Hadza hunter to a nature preserve in Kenya, and noted the astonishment with which this seasoned outdoorsman witnessed, for the first time in his life, wild animals up close. Never before had the hunter been in the presence of creatures of this sort that didn’t retreat at his approach. His wonder testifies to the animals’ adaptive practice of taking flight at the sound that precedes the appearance of the hunter, and reminds us that, in the state of nature, even a musical performance, especially one amplified by collective organization or a special acoustic setting, can serve as an assertion of territorial rights. Today, a piece of paper, the so-called title, gives us dominion over our property; in an earlier day, it could have been something as simple as a song.¹⁴

当我们考虑到早期人类可能不仅是狩猎者，也是食腐动物时，这种观点就更有说服力了。食腐动物必须吓跑其他捕食者——在大多数情况下，这是一项危险的工作。但如果歌曲能让你做到这一点，而不必真正与其他动物对抗呢？如果音乐——在这里指的是合唱音乐，因为声音越大越好，而且人越多音量越大——是比长矛或石头更有力的工具，能确保生存所需的卡路里，那又会怎样？这样的歌曲将成为我们的第一批晚餐音乐，它不像高档餐厅的背景音乐那样柔和舒缓，而是喧闹而具有威胁性，旨在阻止其他食客在用餐时流连忘返。

This view becomes all the more persuasive when we consider that early human beings may have been scavengers as well as hunters and gatherers. The scavenger must scare away other predators—a dangerous job, in most circumstances. But what if songs allowed you to do this without actually confronting other animals? What if music—in this instance, choral music, because the louder the better, and more voices mean more volume—were an even more powerful tool than spear or stone in securing the calories required for survival? Such songs would serve as our first dinner music, not subdued and soothing like the background tracks at a fancy restaurant, but noisy and threatening, designed to dissuade other diners from lingering over their meal.

叛逆的音乐学者约瑟夫·乔丹尼亚甚至声称我们的祖先是“非常缓慢且糟糕的猎人”。武器他们可用的武器远远不够。你真的认为用石头、长矛或弓箭就能杀死狮子或老虎吗？啊，这对早期智人而言几乎无关紧要，因为这些原始猎人拥有更强大的力量，那就是由他们集体叫喊所激发的恐惧。“他们缺乏杀死猎物的天然武器，但他们擅长吓跑所有其他竞争对手，”乔丹尼亚解释说，“包括非洲最强大的捕食者——狮子。”他们不使用传统武器狩猎，而是更喜欢等到狮子或其他大型野兽捕猎完毕。在那一刻，他们开始了他们的夜间音乐会，响亮而有节奏的声音会迫使凶手在食物被吃完之前离开^。15

Renegade music scholar Joseph Jordania goes so far as to claim that our ancestors were “very slow and bad hunters.” The weapons available to them were inadequate. Do you really think you can kill a lion or a tiger with a stone or spear or bow and arrow? Ah, that hardly mattered to early Homo sapiens, because these primitive hunters had something more potent, the terror inspired by their collective voices. “They lacked natural weapons to kill a prey, but they became excellent at scaring away all other competitors,” Jordania explains, “including the strongest of the African predators, the lion.” Rather than hunting with traditional weapons, they preferred to wait until a lion or other large beast had made a kill. At that moment, they began their evening concert, the loud rhythmic sounds that would force the killer to leave before all the food was consumed.¹⁵

如果乔丹尼亚的推测正确，这将有助于解释早期人类社会的一大谜团：为何进化让我们的祖先如此难以躲避捕食者。相反，生理上的变化逐渐使早期人类体型更大、更高、声音更大、更显眼。他们用两条腿站立，而不是像野生动物那样蹲伏、潜行和滑行。人类的几乎所有特质都使其难以练习隐蔽技能（动物隐藏技能的专业术语）。因此，唯一的选择就是采取相反的方法：尽可能唱出最响亮的歌声。如果人类无法匹敌狮子的力量，他们至少可以吼得更响亮——只要他们在歌唱或吟唱时配合配合。

If Jordania is right, it would help explain one of the great mysteries of early human society, namely, why evolution made it so difficult for our ancestors to hide from predators. Instead, changes in physiology gradually made early humans bigger, taller, louder, more obvious. They stood up on two legs, rather than crouching, slinking, and slithering like the more elusive creatures in the wild. Almost everything about human beings made it hard to practice crypsis—the technical term for an animal’s skill at hiding. So the only alternative available was to adopt the opposite approach: to make the biggest songs possible. If humans couldn’t match the lion’s strength, they could at least roar louder—so long as they cooperated in their singing or chanting.

难道这就是为什么我们的民间传说中充满了用音乐对抗敌对势力的故事和迷信吗？难道这就是为什么我们被教导在墓地行走时吹口哨驱赶鬼魂吗？乔丹尼亚回忆起一位格鲁吉亚民谣歌手告诉他：“如果你必须穿越危险的地方，有两种选择。你可以选择尽可能保持安静，以避开熊和狼；但你也可以大声唱歌穿过危险的地方，仿佛在说‘我不害怕！离远点！’”许多文化的民间故事都颂扬这种做法：一位英雄前往冥界或其他危险的境界，用一首神奇的歌战胜黑暗力量^。16

Could this be why our folklore is filled with stories and superstitions about confronting hostile parties with music? Is this why we are taught to whistle when walking by a graveyard to keep away the ghosts? Jordania recalls a Georgian folk singer who told him: “If you have to go through the dangerous places, there are two options how to do this. You can choose to be as silent as possible, in order to stay out of bears and wolves; but you can also go through the dangerous places loudly singing, as if saying ‘I am not afraid! Keep away!’” Folktales from many cultures celebrate this practice: a hero travels to the underworld, or some other perilous realm, and overcomes dark forces by means of a magical song.¹⁶

无论如何，原始狩猎文化的歌曲能够保存足够长的时间以供研究和记录，有一点是明确的：在这些群体中，音乐深深地融入了他们与动物王国的关系中。这些社群依靠特殊的歌曲和仪式来准备狩猎，或用于狩猎后的庆祝活动，或用于赞美杰出的猎人，或在实际追踪猎物时进行交流。然而，这些歌曲并不总是充满敌意。在一个现代人或许难以理解的共生过程中，这些狩猎社会一次又一次地展现出他们与被猎杀的动物的密切认同。在狩猎社会中，祈求被屠杀动物的宽恕或代祷的赎罪歌曲有着丰富的记录。在其他情况下，我们发现一些歌曲祈求更高的力量，以确保猎物得以保存和繁衍——考虑到这些早期社会及其食物来源的相互依存关系，这种担忧是可以理解的，同时也提醒我们，我们源于纯粹人类冲突的、过于简单的“我们”与“他们”的对立态度，忽略了这些早期社会所理解的细微差别。在这里，功能性考虑与一种更神秘的暗流并存，猎人和猎物的角色被刻意模糊^。17

In any event, the songs from primitive hunting cultures that have survived long enough to be studied and documented make one thing clear: in these groups, music is deeply integrated into their relationship with the animal kingdom. These communities rely on special songs and rituals in preparation for the hunt, or for the celebration afterward, or to praise illustrious hunters, or to communicate while actually stalking prey. Yet these songs are not always adversarial. In a symbiotic process that might puzzle the modern mind, these hunting societies again and again reveal their close identification with the same creatures they kill. Songs of propitiation, seeking the forgiveness or intercession of the animal slaughtered, are well documented in hunting communities. In other cases, we find songs invoking higher powers, in order to secure the preservation and propagation of animals of prey—an understandable concern, given the interdependence of these early societies and their sources of food, and a useful reminder that our simplistic us-versus-them attitudes, drawn from purely human conflicts, miss nuances understood by these earlier societies. Here the functional considerations coexist with a more mystical undercurrent, a deliberate blurring of the role of hunter and hunted.¹⁷

这些思考为我们开启了人类音乐创作的另类历史。歌曲在起源之初既拥有实用价值，又蕴含着神奇魔力。它们将社群凝聚在一起，并帮助确保其长久生存。它们开辟了通往神性的道路，也为今晚的餐桌提供了食物。它们是个人和社群蜕变和魅力的源泉。它们编织了神话与意义的织锦，成为最佳实践的化身，并得以代代相传。在当今以音乐为主导的娱乐模式下，歌曲的这些特质如今大多已被遗忘。但这些力量仍然存在于我们的音乐中，大多以潜在的形式存在，有时以令人惊讶的方式得以实现。当我们追溯音乐的后续历史时，我们会发现这些特质反复出现，即使在我们最意想不到的情况下也会遇到它们。

These considerations provide us with the starting point in our alternative history of human music-making. At the moment of origin, songs possessed both functional value and magical properties. They brought communities together, and they helped ensure their long-term survival. They created a pathway to the divine, but they also put food on the table tonight. They served as a source of transformation and enchantment for individuals and communities. They forged a tapestry of myth and meaning, becoming embodiments of best practices in a way that could be handed down from generation to generation. These aspects of song are now mostly forgotten, given the dominant music-as-entertainment paradigm of the current day. But these powers still exist in our music, mostly as latent potential, sometimes actualized in surprising ways. As we trace the subsequent history of music, we will find each of these aspects recurring, even in situations where we least expect to encounter them.

3

3

寻找环球音乐

In Search of a Universal Music

此时，我们遇到了一个棘手的问题——一场几乎从一开始就威胁着颠覆我们历史的争议。当我们揭示定义人类音乐创作的模式和联系时，我们面临着根深蒂固的教条，它甚至否认这些模式和联系的存在。即使我们规划了一条包容性的道路，我们也需要解决长期以来的排他性传统，这几乎是一种碉堡心态，它挑战着我们当前项目的根基。这个棘手的问题有很多名称，取决于你是通过荣格心理学、比较人类学、神经科学还是其他学科来理解它。我更喜欢称之为“音乐普遍性问题”。

At this point we run into a tricky issue—a controversy that threatens to topple our history almost at the very start. As we uncover the patterns and connections that define human music-making, we face a powerful entrenched dogma that denies they even exist. Even as we chart a course of inclusivity, we need to address a long tradition of exclusivity, almost a bunker mentality, that challenges the very underpinnings of the project at hand. This prickly problem goes by many names, depending on whether you arrive at it through Jungian psychology or comparative anthropology or neuroscience or some other discipline. I prefer to call it the problem of musical universals.

我们在研究中会多次遇到它，它通常会以不同寻常、看似难以解释的巧合出现。世界某个地方的音乐传统和仪式会与地球另一端的类似习俗有着惊人的相似之处。例如，在我研究情歌时，我发现宫廷浪漫主义的风气从法国传播到德国和意大利，这并不令人意外。但我该如何解释它出现在格鲁吉亚史诗《豹皮骑士》中呢？这部史诗由……十二世纪末，肖塔·鲁斯塔韦利（Shota Rustaveli）在高加索地区（距普罗旺斯四千公里）发现了这种神秘的生物？“这不可能是西方的影响——普罗旺斯竟然会入侵高加索，这简直令人难以置信，”才华横溢却又困惑不解的中世纪学者彼得·德龙克（Peter Dronke）面对这一异常现象时说道。他不得不得出结论：“格鲁吉亚独自一人创造了她自己的普罗旺斯。” 同样，为什么凯尔特人关于特里斯坦和伊索尔德的故事（在众多法语抒情诗中出现）似乎与法赫鲁丁·阿斯·阿德·戈尔加尼（Fakhruddin As ad Gorgani）创作的十一世纪波斯史诗《维斯与拉明》遥相呼应？为什么我会在被广阔的陆地和海洋隔开的游牧社会的音乐文化中发现如此显著的相似之处？为什么我会在彼此隔绝的文化中，发现疗愈音乐、摇篮曲或战歌的仪式存在着趋同？¹

We will run into it at many junctures in our study, and it will usually present itself via unusual and seemingly inexplicable coincidences. Musical traditions and rituals in one part of the world will bear an astonishing resemblance to similar practices halfway around the globe. In my studies of love songs, for example, I was hardly surprised to find that the ethos of courtly romance spread from France into Germany and Italy. But how do I explain its appearance in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, the Georgian epic composed by Shota Rustaveli in the Caucasus (four thousand kilometers from Provence) around the end of the twelfth century? “This could not be due to Western influence—it is scarcely conceivable that Provence should have traveled into the Caucasus,” declared the brilliant but befuddled medievalist Peter Dronke when confronted with this anomaly. He was forced to conclude: “Georgia makes her own Provence freshly and unaided.” By the same token, why does the Celtic story of lovers Tristan and Iseult, featured in so many French lyrics, seem to echo the eleventh-century Persian epic about the lovers Vis and Rāmin by Fakhruddin Asad Gorgani? Why do I find such marked similarities in the musical cultures of herding societies that are separated by large land masses and oceans? Why do I detect a convergence in the rituals of healing music, or the lullaby, or war songs in cultures isolated from one another?¹

在深入探讨人类历史之前，我们必须先解决这个问题，因为这些相似之处在狩猎采集社会的音乐实践中已经显而易见。西伯利亚的萨满音乐仪式在美洲原住民部落的实践中反复出现——或许，我们可以追溯到一次真实的迁徙，那次迁徙发生在一万五千多年前。基因证据证实了美洲原住民和西伯利亚人之间存在亲缘关系。但我们如何解释这些相同的音乐实践与澳大利亚原住民、南非桑人或世界其他地区从业者的音乐实践之间的一致性呢？例如，大约40%的桑人猎人经历过恍惚状态，这些精神状态的改变不仅与相距一万两千公里的西伯利亚萨满巫师的精神状态相似，就连相关的音乐实践也出奇地一致。令人着迷的节奏、仪式性的舞蹈以及与动物精灵的祈求似乎都出自同一本剧本。同样的情况也发生在澳大利亚的萨满身上，这些部落长老被学者AP·埃尔金称为“高阶原住民”，他们的智慧、音乐实践和神圣仪式与地球另一端的美洲萨满有着惊人的相似之处。即使在西方文明的核心，在所谓的理性主义世界观中，^{在古希腊，我们遇到了下文将要讨论的奥尔菲斯教传统，它显然代表了萨满教实践的一种变体。}西伯利亚萨满真的将他们的教义传授给了柏拉图和亚里士多德的祖先，还是反过来？这种传播途径令人费解，但更令人难以接受的是，仅仅巧合就能解释这种趋同。2

We must address this issue before proceeding further in our history because these similarities are already noticeable in the musical practices of hunter-gatherer societies. The shamanistic musical rituals of Siberia are echoed again and again in the practices of Native American tribes—and here, perhaps, we can trace an actual migration, one that took place more than fifteen thousand years ago. Genetic evidence confirms kinship between Native American and Siberian populations. But how do we explain the congruence between these same musical practices and those found among the Aboriginals of Australia, or the San people of southern Africa, or practitioners in other parts of the globe? Some 40 percent of San hunters experienced trances, for example, and not only do these altered mental states resemble those of our Siberian shamans—twelve thousand kilometers distant!—but even the associated musical practices are eerily congruent. The mesmerizing rhythms, ritualistic dancing, and intercession with animal spirits seem to come from the exact same playbook. And the same can be said of the Australian shamans, those tribal elders that scholar A. P. Elkin calls “Aboriginal men of high degree,” and whose body of wisdom, musical practice, and sacred ritual bear uncanny similarities to those found half a world away in the Americas. Even at the heart of Western civilization, in the supposedly rationalistic worldview of ancient Greece, we encounter the Orphic tradition, discussed below, which clearly represents a variant of shamanistic practice. Did Siberian shamans really impart their teachings to the ancestors of Plato and Aristotle, or vice versa? The mind boggles at such a path of transmission, but resists even more vehemently the notion that mere coincidence can explain such convergences.²

我可以举出许多其他例子，但我们得出的结论在每个例子中都是一样的。我们的扩散和迁移理论失效了，我们面临一个看似无法解决的难题。有时我们漫不经心地将音乐称为一种通用语言，但这句经常被重复的流行语蕴含着深刻的真理。那些研究音乐实践多样性的人会发现太多共通之处，这绝非偶然。

I could cite numerous other examples, but the conclusion we reach would be the same in every instance. Our theories of dispersion and migration break down, and we are left with a seemingly unsolvable puzzle. Sometimes we speak casually of music as a universal language, but this oft-repeated catchphrase contains a profound truth. Those who study the multiplicity of musical practices arrive at too many commonalities for it to be just a matter of chance.

这些相似之处是否源于人类生物学？或许我们创作情歌或唱摇篮曲的方式是因为我们DNA的设定。又或许，这些音乐实践本身就具有达尔文式的生存价值，因此最终在彼此之间没有直接联系的社会和社群中占据主导地位？又或许，荣格关于心理原型的假设是正确的，他假设我们所有人都拥有这些普遍的概念，只是我们并非有意识地拥有它们？又或许，这些音乐实践真的传播到了如此遥远的距离？——这一理论引发了一系列关于如何、何时以及为何传播的问题。

Are the similarities rooted in human biology? Perhaps we make love songs or sing lullabies in certain ways because our DNA programs us to do so. Or do these musical practices possess Darwinian survival value, and thus eventually come to the forefront of societies and communities that have no direct contact with each other? Or was Jung correct, in hypothesizing the existence of psychological archetypes, universal concepts that we all share, but not consciously? Or did these musical practices actually spread over these enormous distances?—a theory that raises a litany of questions about how, when, and why.

通常情况下，我们会求助于民族音乐学家来解决这个问题。这些学者毕生致力于研究人类社会多元化的音乐实践，他们理应成为研究歌曲风格和类型共性和一致性的领军人物。但事实却截然相反。该领域的领军学者更倾向于强调不同音乐文化之间的差异，而对那些寻求融合的学者则持怀疑态度，有时甚至不屑一顾。“当我还是学生的时候，”民族音乐学家布鲁诺·内特尔反思道，“我被教导说，任何试图对世界音乐进行概括的尝试都应该用一个可以推翻这种概括的例子来反驳。” 尽管承认普遍性问题值得学者关注，但内特尔指出音乐学领域在21世纪明显“暂时放弃了这一概念”。研究人员史蒂文·布朗和约瑟夫·乔丹尼亚在最近的一项调查中总结道：“数十年的怀疑论阻碍了音乐学领域认识到音乐共性的重要性。”他们补充道，在少数明确提出这个问题的情况下，几乎总是以“对共性概念的元批评”的形式出现，而不是对实证证据的实际考量。这个话题似乎在音乐学家中引发了明显的焦虑，仿佛他们希望它消失似的^。3

Normally we would turn to ethnomusicologists to solve this problem for us. These are scholars who devote their careers to the study of the diverse musical practices of human societies, and they ought to serve as the leading investigators into the commonalities and congruencies in song styles and types. But the exact opposite has been the case. The leading scholars in this field have preferred to emphasize the differences between musical cultures, and treat with suspicion—and sometimes even disdain—those who seek out convergences. “When I was a student,” ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl has reflected, “I was taught that any attempt to generalize about the music of the world should be countered by an example falsifying that generalization.” Even while acknowledging that the question of universals deserves attention from scholars, Nettl notes his field’s apparent “temporary abandonment of it” well into the twenty-first century. “Many decades of skepticism have prevented the field of musicology from embracing the importance of musical universals,” researchers Steven Brown and Joseph Jordania conclude in a recent survey. On the few occasions when the question is explicitly addressed, they add, it is almost always in the form of “meta-critiques about the concept of universals,” rather than actual consideration of empirical evidence. The topic seems to produce a marked anxiety among musicologists, almost as if they wish it would go away.³

这种对普遍性的拒绝，其动机是好的。许多民族音乐学家认为，通过强调每一种音乐传统的独特性和不可通约性，他们提升了自己领域的尊严。这种态度，如果以开放和尊重为基础，可以理解，事实上，值得称赞。但如果将其推向极端，沦为僵化的方法论命令，这种差异性和排他性的教条将付出沉重的代价。如今，我们许多人都对其他群体的差异如此之大，以至于他们的文化与我们的文化之间存在着不可逾越的鸿沟感到不安，而且不难看出，这种世界观可能导致令人不快的决定和后果。但简而言之，它也是一个有缺陷的研究和学术平台。想象一下，如果语言学研究从未经历过乔姆斯基主义、结构主义以及之后的阶段，会是什么样子。试想一下，如果学者们仍然坚持从过去的社会相对论模型来理解语言，竭力用20世纪20年代陈旧的萨丕尔-沃尔夫假说来解释问题——该假说回避了跨文化联系，认为世界上的众多语言给同一个社群的成员强加了互不相容（且往往是刻板的）的行为模式——同时又忽视了挑战其假设的最新研究，将会产生怎样的影响。如今，这种看待人和文化的方式被认为是语言学历史上可耻的一部分。然而，这与过去一个世纪民族音乐学的典型教学和实践方式并无二致。

This rejection of universals has been driven by the best of motives. Many ethnomusicologists believe that they raise the dignity of their field by emphasizing the uniqueness and incommensurability of each and every musical tradition. This attitude is understandable—in fact, commendable—when presented in these terms as a mindset built on openness and respect. But when pushed to an extreme and turned into a rigid methodological imperative, this doctrine of difference and exclusivity exacts too heavy a cost. The insistence that other groups are so different that an unbridgeable gulf separates their cultures from ours makes many of us uneasy in the current day, and it’s not hard to see that this worldview can lead to unpleasant decisions and consequences. But it’s also, put simply, a flawed platform for research and scholarship. Imagine if the study of linguistics had never gone through its Chomskian, structuralist, and later phases. Consider the impact if scholars still insisted on grasping language from the perspective of social relativity models from the past, struggling to explain matters with the moldy old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from the 1920s—which avoided cross-cultural linkages and held that the world’s many languages imposed incompatible (and often stereotypical) behavior patterns on members of a community—while ignoring more recent research that challenged their assumptions. Today that way of looking at people and culture is considered a shameful part of the past history of linguistics. Yet it’s not dissimilar to how ethnomusicology has typically been taught and practiced over the past century.

这在音乐研究中造成了令人不安的分歧，民族音乐学领域的大多数学者都朝着一个方向发展，而该领域之外的几乎所有专家都持相反观点。许多老派民族音乐学家对此表示强烈不满，因为哈佛大学的一组科学家最近宣布了他们的研究结果：当 60 个国家的人们被要求听 86 个不同社会群体的歌曲时，他们能够轻易辨别出不同类型的音乐——摇篮曲、情歌、舞曲——即使只听了几秒钟的表演。一位音乐教授向《纽约时报》抱怨说，这项研究“基于各种假设” 。该领域的另一位学者反驳道：“音乐是普遍的，但它的意义却不是。”协助哈佛团队的民族音乐学家帕特里克·萨维奇承认，这项研究面临着巨大的阻力，因为“音乐中存在任何普遍性的想法长期以来一直被同行所鄙视”。萨维奇是少数挑战现状的年轻音乐学者之一，但他们面临着艰巨的挑战^。4

This has created a troubling divide in music research, with most scholars within the field of ethnomusicology going in one direction, and almost every expert outside the field taking an opposite tack. Many old-school ethnomusicologists complained bitterly after a group of Harvard scientists recently announced their discovery that people in sixty countries, when asked to listen to songs from eighty-six different societies, could easily identify the differences between different types of music—lullabies, love songs, dance music—even after only hearing a few seconds of a performance. The study “is based on all kinds of presumptions,” one music professor complained to the New York Times. “Music is universal,” rebutted another scholar in the field, “it’s meaning is not.” Patrick Savage, an ethnomusicologist who assisted the Harvard team, admitted that the research faced tremendous resistance because “the idea that there’s anything universal in music has been looked down upon for so long” by others in his field. Savage is one of a handful of younger music scholars challenging the status quo, but they face an uphill struggle.⁴

然而，哈佛大学的这项研究只是一系列研究中的最新一项——这些研究几乎全部来自科学家，而非音乐史学家——这些研究都承认歌曲中存在着强大的跨文化一致性。尽管民族音乐学一直抵制（用音乐研究员安东尼·西格的话来说）“重同轻异”，但其他领域的专家们也纷纷涌现，试图填补这一空白。我们已经探讨过神经科学家为识别世界不同音乐文化中的生理常数所做的努力，但社会科学家那些鲜为人知的努力——他们的工作基本上被音乐史学家忽视——可能对他们的学科更有意义。哈佛大学教授EJ·迈克尔·维策尔关于神话学的开创性著作探讨了困扰音乐史领域的那些问题，但音乐史领域的学者们对此仍然一无所知。维策尔首先提出的谜题与我们在音乐中发现的几乎完全相同：许多神话在地球上遥远的地区都有类似的对应物——大洪水的故事、骗子的形象、俄耳甫斯的故事，以及其他类似普遍存在的故事或故事组成部分。乍一看，维策尔提出的解释似乎几乎无法接受：即这些神话都起源于我们六万多年前的共同祖先，早于“走出非洲”的迁徙^。5

Yet the Harvard study was only the latest in a long series of studies—almost all of them coming from scientists, not music historians—recognizing powerful cross-cultural congruencies in song. Even as ethnomusicology has resisted (in the words of music researcher Anthony Seeger) “the privileging of similarities over differences,” experts in other fields have rushed in to fill the gap. We have already looked at the efforts by neuroscientists to identify physiological constants in the world’s various musical cultures, but the lesser-known efforts by social scientists, whose work is essentially ignored by music historians, may have even more relevance to their discipline. Harvard professor E. J. Michael Witzel’s pathbreaking work on mythology addresses the exact same questions that bedevil the field of music history, yet it remains unknown among scholars in the latter field. Witzel starts with a puzzle nearly identical to what we have found in music: many myths have close counterparts in far-flung regions of the globe—the story of the great flood, the figure of the trickster, the tale of Orpheus, and other quasi-universal stories or story components. At first glance, Witzel’s proposed explanation seems almost impossible to accept: namely, that these myths all originated in our common ancestry more than sixty thousand years ago, before the “out of Africa” migrations.⁵

这怎么可能是真的？这意味着这些神话流传了三千代！在如此漫长的岁月中，即使社会和文化的方方面面都发生了变化，这些故事还能基本保持完整吗？然而，关于语言早期起源以及印欧语系和其他语系可能前身的类似假说，在语言学家中正日益受到追捧，而对不同人类群体基因起源的研究也为这些假说提供了可信度。维策尔大胆地预测，一个“包罗万象的体系”将“最终将遗传学、语言学、神话学和考古学文化的‘家谱’统一在一个‘超级谱系’中” ^。6

How can that possibly be true? It would imply that these myths were handed down for three thousand generations! Could stories have remained largely intact over such a long time frame, even as almost every other aspect of society and culture changed? Yet similar hypotheses about the early origins of languages and possible precursors to Indo-European and other language families are increasingly gaining adherents among linguists, and research into the genetic origins of different human populations gives credibility to their claims. Witzel boldly predicts an “all-encompassing scheme” that will “ultimately unite the ‘family trees’ of genetics, linguistics, mythology and archaeological cultures in one ‘superpedigree.’”⁶

面对这一新范式，其他学科也在不断调整，而音乐学者却停滞不前。例如，童话故事的年代通常基于其首次以书面形式出现的时间。150多年前，一些大胆的理论家推测童话故事的起源要久远得多，尤其是威廉·格林兄弟——如今，他们的名字已与这些脍炙人口的故事密不可分——他们认为这些故事可能有数千年的历史。但后来的专家们认为这只是异想天开。学术界文学批评中一个颇具影响力的思潮将这类故事解读为以书籍为基础、面向城市读者的叙事——本质上是资本主义时代的产物。即使乍一看，这种解读也令人感到不适。许多这类故事都涉及黑暗和非理性的主题，而认为它们是出于商业目的而创作的想法似乎与童话故事的整体精神背道而驰。而现在，我们才刚刚开始理解这些故事究竟有多么古老——以及它们究竟有多么普遍。萨拉·格拉萨·达席尔瓦和贾姆希德·特赫拉尼最近的研究有力地支持了格林的观点。他们研究了各种各样的童话故事，并将它们分为七十六种基本类型，这些类型可以在不同的语言和文化中追溯到它们。学者们得出结论，这些故事起源于《圣经》或希腊神话之前，可以追溯到青铜时代^。7

Other disciplines are adjusting in the face of this new paradigm, even as music scholars stand still. Fairy tales, for example, have often been dated on the basis of their first appearance in written form. More than 150 years ago, a few bold theorists speculated on a much longer lineage, notably Wilhelm Grimm—one of the brothers whose names are now inextricably connected with these popular stories—who believed they might be thousands of years old. But later experts dismissed this as a fanciful notion. An influential current in academic literary criticism interpreted such stories as book-based narratives targeted at an urban audience—in essence, a creation of the age of capitalism. Even at first glance, that just doesn’t feel right. So many of these stories deal with dark and irrational themes, and the idea that they were constructed for commercial purposes seems to run counter to the whole ethos of the fairy tale. And now we are just beginning to understand how old—and universal—these stories really are. Recent research by Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani strongly supports Grimm’s view. They studied a wide range of fairy tales and classified them into seventy-six basic types, which then could be traced in different languages and cultures. The scholars concluded that these tales originated before the Bible or Greek myths, back during the Bronze Age.⁷

为什么音乐应该被排除在这一深厚的传承之外？尤其考虑到传统文化中，神话和民间故事被吟唱的频率，这些相关领域的新发现竟然没有被纳入我们对音乐的理解，这似乎更加令人匪夷所思。而一旦我们将歌曲研究融入到更广泛的神话和移民潮流中，许多此前无法解释的谜团便迎刃而解。上文提到的俄耳甫斯传说就是一个很好的例子。你可能还记得，俄耳甫斯以其精湛的音乐技艺而闻名——他精湛的里拉琴技艺甚至征服了冥界的两位主神——哈迪斯和珀耳塞福涅，使他得以将妻子欧律狄克从冥界带回。早在1929年，学者维托里奥·马基奥罗在哥伦比亚大学的一系列讲座中宣称，俄耳甫斯必须被理解为某种萨满，此举震惊了古典学界。俄耳甫斯在希腊文化中的存在意味着南欧存在一种狂喜的、以音乐为主导的宗教，类似于人类学家在其他地方记录的宗教。六年后，学者AH Gayton发表了题为《北美的俄耳甫斯神话》的研究，这更是火上浇油。Gayton指出：“在北美神话中，从亡灵之地找回挚爱之人的故事很常见。”她补充说，这个著名希腊神话的许多具体细节，包括障碍和条件（例如不去看的禁忌），都能在新大陆的版本中找到。Gayton在50多个美洲原住民部落中发现了这个神话的证据。人类学家Åke Hultkrantz后来扩展了这项工作，并记录了这个故事更广泛的传播。然而，这个故事最奇怪的地方一定是早期的研究者甚至不愿注意到其中的关联。早在 1636 年，法国耶稣会传教士 Jean de Brébeuf 就在休伦人中发现了一个俄耳甫斯的故事，然而直到两个多世纪过去了，才有人认识到这个故事与著名的希腊神话的相似之处^。8

Why should music be exempted from this deep lineage? Especially when one considers how often myths and folktales are sung in traditional cultures, it seems all the more peculiar that new findings in these related fields haven’t been incorporated into our understanding of music. And once we integrate our study of songs into these broader currents of myth and migration, many previously inexplicable mysteries are solved. The Orpheus legend, mentioned above, provides a powerful example. As you may recall, Orpheus was renowned for the potency of his music—his skill on the lyre was so great, it even charmed Hades and Persephone, the presiding deities of the underworld, who allowed the musician to bring back his wife Eurydice from the land of the dead. Back in 1929, scholar Vittorio Macchioro shocked the community of classicists when he proclaimed, in a series of lectures at Columbia University, that Orpheus must be understood as a kind of shaman. His presence in Greek culture signifies the existence in southern Europe of an ecstatic, music-driven religion similar to those documented elsewhere by anthropologists. Scholar A. H. Gayton added fuel to the flames when, six years later, she published her study on “The Orpheus Myth in North America.” “Tales of the recovery of a beloved person from the land of the dead are common in North American mythology,” Gayton noted, and added that many of the specific details from the famous Greek myth, including obstacles and conditions (such as the taboo of not looking), can be found in New World variants. Gayton found evidence of this myth in more than fifty Native American tribes. Anthropologist Åke Hultkrantz would later expand on this work and document an even wider distribution of the tale. Yet the strangest aspect of this story must be the reluctance of earlier researchers to even notice the correlation. French Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf had discovered an Orpheus story among the Huron as far back as 1636, yet more than two centuries would elapse before anyone recognized the resemblance to the well-known Greek myth.⁸

二十世纪中叶，来自不同学科的众多研究人员进一步拓展了这些见解。无论我们读的是古典学家 E.R. 多兹的《希腊人与非理性》（1951 年）、人类学家 Åke Hultkrantz 的《北美印第安人俄耳甫斯传统》（1957 年）、社会历史学家 Mircea Eliade 的《萨满教：古代的狂喜技巧》（1951 年）、神话学家 Joseph Campbell 的《千面英雄》（1949 年），还是科学哲学家 Thomas Kuhn 的《科学革命的结构》（1962 年），我们都会看到同样的景象。在每一个方向，我们都会看到关于文化传统的起源和联系的新视角。在每一个关头，理性的西方思想与所谓的原始人的迷信信仰体系之间的假定分歧都会受到质疑并被发现存在缺陷，而原始人长期以来因其轻信和反科学的世界观而受到嘲笑。其他发现也为这个故事增添了细节——例如，在库恩出版他那本具有影响力的著作的同时，德维尼纸莎草纸的出土，清楚地表明了魔法和神秘主义对于孕育了我们优越的科学世界观的希腊文化有多么重要。

At the midpoint of the twentieth century, a range of researchers from different disciplines expanded on these insights. Wherever we turn, we see the same picture emerging—whether we read classicist E. R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), anthropologist Åke Hultkrantz’s The North-American Indian Orpheus Tradition (1957), social historian Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), mythologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), or philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). In every direction, we encounter a new perspective emerging on the origins and connections of cultural traditions. At each juncture, the assumed division between rational Western thought and superstitious belief systems of so-called primitives, long ridiculed for their credulity and antiscientific worldviews, was questioned and found wanting. Other discoveries were adding details to the story—for example, the unearthing of the Derveni Papyrus at the same time Kuhn was publishing his influential book made clear how significant magic and mysticism were to the same Greek culture that supposedly spawned our superior scientific view of the world.

由于各种原因，很少有音乐相关学科的学者关注到这种转变，而许多人则努力反对它。诸如美国国家音乐治疗协会（成立于 1950 年）和民族音乐学会（成立于 1955 年）等组织理所当然地希望建立其学科的准科学严谨性和学术合法性。但有时这会导致奇怪的结果。当《音乐治疗杂志》发表了该领域的主要文章汇编——超过九百页的学术和临床著作——它完全忽略了非学术人群实践的所有传统疗法。在最奇怪的一项记录中，一项关于美国音乐治疗的调查，其历史从乔治·华盛顿的就职典礼开始，却只字未提美国原住民文化中众所周知且有丰富文献记载的治疗歌曲。音乐疗法可以从“原始”音乐传统中学习（甚至承认其存在）的想法，在这部选集的编纂者看来，是极其不恰当的，甚至可以说是荒谬的。然而，即使他们努力制造这种分歧，学术研究的累积影响其他领域的研究正在颠覆他们自满的世界观。音乐、魔法、医学和神秘主义正在融合，其他领域富有洞察力的学者们现在正在将这些领域联系起来，而不是试图忽视或抹去它们^。9

For a variety of reasons, few academics in music-related disciplines paid attention to this shift, and many worked to oppose it. Organizations such as the National Association for Music Therapy (founded in 1950) and the Society for Ethnomusicology (founded in 1955) justifiably wanted to establish the quasi-scientific rigor and academic legitimacy of their disciplines. But sometimes this led to bizarre results. When the Journal of Music Therapy published a huge compilation of the leading articles in the field—over nine hundred pages of scholarly and clinical work—it completely ignored all traditional therapies practiced by nonacademic populations. In the strangest entry of all, a survey of music therapy in America, the history begins with the inauguration of George Washington, and fails to mention the well-known and richly documented healing songs of Native American culture. The idea that music therapy could learn something from (or even acknowledge the existence of) ‘primitive’ musical traditions would have struck the compilers of this anthology as highly inappropriate, perhaps ludicrous. But even as they worked to create this divide, the cumulative impact of scholarship in other fields was toppling their complacent worldview. Music and magic and medicine and mysticism were coalescing, and perspicacious scholars in other fields were now drawing connections between these areas, not trying to ignore or erase them.⁹

如果我们展望音乐研究的未来，我们可以预见这些不同领域之间将会出现更加紧密的联系。乍一看，专业化程度的提高似乎在当今造成了关于音乐的碎片化论述，在这种令人困惑的局面下，许多音乐学家仍然没有意识到其他学科——认知心理学、进化生物学、神经化学、社会学、神话学以及其他领域——对其领域产生影响的进展。即便如此，知识仍在不断进步，人类歌曲中近乎普遍性的现实也随着时间的流逝而越来越难以回避。我们曾经可以假装不同的音乐文化是不可通约且孤立的现象，如今已成过去。学科之间的地盘之争或许会减缓关于这种融合的共识的形成，但远不足以阻止它。即使是怀疑论者也会越来越清晰地认识到，音乐的基石（五声音阶、五度圈、三和声等等）并非由音乐家发明，而是由他们发现的——就像微积分或万有引力定律一样。正如万有引力定律在世界任何地方都适用一样，歌曲的关键要素也同样适用。同样地，这波新的研究浪潮将揭示我们有多少共同点，有多少相似之处，以及我们的歌曲如何将我们紧密联系在一起，而不是彼此疏远。这不仅应该成为一种良好的研究实践，甚至可能值得培育和庆祝。

If we peer ahead into the future of music studies, we can anticipate even closer connections between these different fields. At first glance, greater degrees of specialization seem to have created a fragmented discourse about music in the current day, a confusing landscape in which many musicologists remain unaware of the advances in other disciplines—cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, neurochemistry, sociology, mythology, and other areas—that impact their field. Even so, the march of knowledge moves forward, and the reality of quasi-universal aspects of human song becomes harder to evade with each passing year. The days when we could pretend that separate musical cultures operate as incommensurable and isolated phenomena are now behind us. The turf wars between academic disciplines may slow down the emerging consensus on this convergence, but will hardly be sufficient to prevent it. Even skeptics will grasp, with increasing clarity, that the bedrock foundations of music (the pentatonic scale, the circle of fifths, triadic harmony, etc.) were not invented by musicians, but discovered by them—much like calculus or the theory of gravity. Just as the law of gravity applies wherever you go in the world, so do key aspects of songs. By the same token, this new wave of research will reveal how much we have in common, how much we are alike, how closely our songs bring us together, and not apart. And that shouldn’t just be a matter of good research practice, but maybe even something to nurture and celebrate.

对于音乐史学家而言，这种融合需要重新审视以往时代的传统描述，并更加敏感地看待先前孤立主义“不可通约”文化模型未能考虑到的证据和环境。因此，日益壮大的音乐共性科学研究，其对过去的影响可能不亚于对未来的影响。事实上，本书的每一章都应被视为一个案例研究，探讨这种更广阔的历史视角究竟是什么样的。

For the music historian, this convergence requires a reevaluation of the conventional accounts of previous eras, and a greater sensitivity to evidence and circumstances that the previous isolationist models of ‘incommensurable’ cultures failed to consider. As such, the growing body of science on musical universals may impact the past as much as it does the future. In fact, each chapter in this book should be considered as a case study in what this broader historical perspective might look like.

4

4

音乐史是一场魔法与数学的战斗

Music History as a Battle Between Magic and Mathematics

在西方历史上的某个时期，音乐成为了准科学。或者更准确地说，那些构建音乐理论的人设法强加了一个科学和数学框架，从而边缘化了所有其他研究音乐的方法。我们甚至可以为这场革命指定一个名称、一个地点和一个大致的日期。所谓的创新者是萨摩斯的毕达哥拉斯，他出生于公元前 570 年左右。毕达哥拉斯革命对后世音乐进程的影响仍未得到充分的理解和重视。我相信他是音乐史上最重要的人物——尽管他的“创新”可能弊大于利——我将在后面的内容中为这一大胆的论断辩护。然而，他常常被视为文化史上一个丰富多彩的注脚，一个出现在轶事和旁白中的迷人人物，但并不在文化史的主流叙事中。

At a certain point in Western history, music became a quasi-science. Or, to be more precise, those who theorized about music managed to impose a scientific and mathematical framework that would marginalize all other approaches to the subject. We can even assign a name, a location, and a rough date to this revolution. The alleged innovator was Pythagoras of Samos, born around the year 570 BC. The impact of the Pythagorean revolution on the later course of music is still insufficiently understood and appreciated. I believe he is the most important person in the history of music—although his ‘innovation’ has perhaps done as much harm as good—and I will make a case for that bold claim in the pages ahead. Yet he is often treated as little more than a colorful footnote in cultural history, a charming figure who appears in anecdotes and asides, but not in the mainstream narrative of cultural history.

毕达哥拉斯被归类为其他“前苏格拉底”思想家，这一事实本身就令人悲伤。他因我们关注的是他之前的研究，而不是他实际做了什么。事实上，我们应该更加关注毕达哥拉斯出现之前发生的事情，我称之为前苏格拉底时代，而不是通过之后发生的事情来定义他的贡献。在他到来之前的希腊文化崇尚我们今天所说的俄尔菲斯思想（以神话中的音乐家俄尔菲斯命名，但在那个遥远的年代几乎可以肯定他是一位历史人物），并且相信歌曲拥有强大的魔力。大约公元前 500 年，毕达哥拉斯音乐理论的兴起改变了所有这一切，它将音乐概念化为一种可以用数学术语描述的理性声音科学。今天，人们有很多关于音乐算法的讨论——从作曲到策划的各个方面都被简化为规则和公式——但第一个算法是在 2500 多年前随着这场哲学断裂进入西方音乐的。

The very fact that Pythagoras is lumped together with other ‘pre-Socratic’ thinkers is sadly revealing. He is remembered for what he preceded, rather than for what he actually did. In truth, we should pay far more attention to what happened before Pythagoras emerged on the scene, what I might call the pre-pre-Socratic era, rather than defining his contribution by what happened afterward. Greek culture before his arrival revered what we call nowadays Orphic thought (named after Orpheus, the mythical musician, but almost certainly considered a historical personage in those distant days), and believed songs possessed powerful magic. The rise of Pythagorean music theory, circa 500 BC, changed all that by conceptualizing music as a rational science of sounds that could be described in mathematical terms. Today there’s a lot of talk about algorithms in music—with every aspect, from composition to curation, reduced to rules and formulas—but the very first algorithm entered Western music with this philosophical rupture that happened more than 2,500 years ago.

毕达哥拉斯试图用数字和比率来定义和限制音乐的声音，这种尝试至今仍在影响着我们今天对歌曲的概念化和演奏方式，甚至影响着我们区分旋律和噪音的方式。如今，世界上每所大学和音乐学院所教授的音乐，其方法和假设都明确地体现了毕达哥拉斯式的。即使当非洲侨民的音乐风格挑战了这一范式，并用不属于音阶和节奏的音符，挑战着传统的韵律思维，试图推翻它时，算法思维仍然占了上风，并以某种方式将那些看似难以被规范化的非毕达哥拉斯式演奏风格规范化。即使在今天，我仍然将毕达哥拉斯精神视为支撑数字音乐进步（将歌曲最终简化为数学）以及合成器、鼓机、自动调音和当今录音的动态范围压缩等技术发展的潜在哲学。

Pythagoras’s attempt to define and constrain musical sounds by the use of numbers and ratios continues to shape how we conceptualize and perform songs in the current day, and even how we distinguish between melody and noise. Music, as it is taught in every university and conservatory in the world today, is explicitly Pythagorean in its methods and assumptions. And even when musical styles emerged from the African diaspora that challenged this paradigm, threatening to topple it with notes that didn’t belong to scales and rhythms that defied conventional metric thinking, the algorithmic mindset prevailed, somehow managing to codify non-Pythagorean performance styles that would seem to resist codification. Even today, I see the Pythagorean spirit as the implicit philosophy undergirding the advances of digital music—the ultimate reduction of song to mathematics—and technologies such as synthesizers, drum machines, Auto-Tune, and the dynamic range compression of current-day recordings.

西方音乐与数学的融合导致了惊人的不协调。非洲音乐传入美国后，即使是最训练有素的听众也难以分析其内涵。音乐学家亨利·爱德华·克雷比尔在……（此处似有误，原文疑似拼写错误，无法翻译）与非洲鼓手的相遇让他大吃一惊。1893 年芝加哥世界哥伦布纪念博览会期间，达荷美村的一位音乐家向他介绍了非洲音乐，于是他聘请了另一位美洲原住民音乐专家来帮助他记录他们的复节奏——但两人都沮丧地放弃了，因为他们意识到这些歌曲无法被他们的图式和体系所吸收。但快进到我们这个时代，看看这种情况发生了怎样的变化。无数关于非洲音乐的学术书籍承诺将这门以前难以捉摸的艺术编纂成法典，而这门学科在课堂上被冷漠地作为一门基于规则（或算法）的学科与赋格曲和奏鸣曲一起教授。打破规则的音乐现在被简化为规则。同样，布鲁斯音乐出现于 20 世纪初，是一种挑战音阶和标准语调的方式。你根本无法把这种音乐写在纸上。但今天，数百本教学书籍提供布鲁斯音阶和乐句的教学，并充满了乐谱来阐明过程中的每个步骤。更奇怪的是，编写这些教科书的人似乎常常没有意识到，这种同化过程在多大程度上扭曲了他们试图传播的传统。即使我对非西方音乐主流化的一些后果感到不寒而栗（并试图在接下来的篇幅中纠正其过度之处），我必须尊重它。在某种程度上，我们当今音乐界的所有人都是毕达哥拉斯主义者。

Amazing incongruities resulted from this Western convergence of music and mathematics. African music, when transplanted to the United States, defied the attempts of even the most highly trained listeners to analyze it. Musicologist Henry Edward Krehbiel was so dumbfounded by his encounter with African drummers in the Dahomey Village at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that he enlisted another scholar, a specialist in Native American music, to help him notate their polyrhythms—but both gave up in dismay, realizing that these songs could not be assimilated by their schemas and systems. But fast-forward to our own times, and see how this has changed. Countless academic books on African music promise a codification of this previously elusive art, and the subject is taught dispassionately as a rule-based (or algorithmic) discipline in classrooms alongside the fugue and sonata. The music that broke the rules is now reduced to rules. By the same token, the blues emerged in the early twentieth century as a way of defying scales and standard intonation. You simply couldn’t write this music down on paper. But today hundreds of method books offer to teach you the blues scale and phrasing, and are filled with musical notation to clarify each step in the process. Even stranger, the people who write these textbooks often seem unaware of how much this process of assimilation distorts the very traditions they are attempting to propagate. Even if I shudder at some of the results of this mainstreaming of non-Western music (and try to correct its excesses in the pages ahead), I must respect it. To some extent, all of us in music today are Pythagoreans.

“毕达哥拉斯，这位严肃的哲学家，拒绝用感官来评判音乐，”普鲁塔克在他的一篇评论中解释道，“他断言音乐的美德只有通过智力才能欣赏。因此，他不是用耳朵来评判音乐，而是用和声的比例来评判。” 多么奇怪的想法！音乐不能用耳朵来评价？这让我想起了马克·吐温那句讽刺的话：“瓦格纳的音乐比听起来更好。” 然而，这正是毕达哥拉斯奠定西方音乐的基础。在他之前，其他人也曾就如何调弦乐器提出建议——我们甚至在古代美索不达米亚就有关于这方面的相当详细的著作——但毕达哥拉斯比他已知的任何前辈都更进一步地推进了这些观点，将之前被认为是一门实用技艺的东西变成了一门科学学科。如果说音乐中之前存在理论，那也只是为了验证实践；在毕达哥拉斯之后，这种关系情况完全颠倒了：实践现在可以用理论来验证了。效仿毕达哥拉斯的学者甚至接受了天体创造了一种渗透到人类生活中的“天体和谐”这一奇特说法，却从未停下来解释为什么没有人真正听到这种音乐。这种音乐并非用耳朵听到的这一观点或许更增强了它的吸引力和人们所认为的重要性。在毕达哥拉斯的体系中，声音几乎不值得大肆宣扬^。1

“Pythagoras, that grave philosopher, rejected the judging of music by the senses,” explains Plutarch in one of his commentaries, “affirming that the virtue of music could be appreciated only by the intellect. And therefore he did not judge music by the ear, but by the harmonical proportion.” What a strange notion! Music can’t be evaluated by the ear? I am reminded of Mark Twain’s sarcastic remark that “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Yet this is precisely the foundation on which Pythagoras placed Western music. Others before him had offered suggestions on how to tune string instruments—we even have fairly detailed works on the subject from ancient Mesopotamia—but Pythagoras pushed these views further than any of his known predecessors, taking what previously had been a practical craft and aiming to turn it into a scientific discipline. If theory existed previously in music, it served simply to validate practice; after Pythagoras, this relationship was flipped on its head: practice would now be validated by theory. Scholars following his example even came to accept the bizarre claim that celestial bodies created a “harmony of the spheres” permeating human affairs, yet never stopped to explain why no one could actually hear this music. The idea that it wasn’t heard with the ears perhaps even heightened its allure and perceived importance. Within the Pythagorean schema, sounds were hardly worth making a noise about.¹

事实证明，面对各种挑战，这套新系统具有惊人的适应力。到了公元 4 世纪后期撰写音乐论文的奥古斯丁时期，音乐已基本被数学化。他甚至使用拉丁词numeri（即“数字”）来表示节奏。音乐的脉搏现在是一种计数，而表演的前进运动则是一种计算。情况一直如此，直到 20 世纪非洲人的流散打破了这种自满的观点。在毕达哥拉斯之后的两千多年，哲学家戈特弗里德·威廉·莱布尼茨仍然可以用与前苏格拉底圣人基本相同的方式定义音乐：他坚持认为，我们最珍爱的歌曲只不过是“一种无意识的算术练习，大脑并不知道自己在数数。”对此，我欣喜地注意到，亚瑟·叔本华巧妙地回应道，音乐实际上是“一种无意识的形而上学练习，心灵并没有意识到自己正在进行哲学思考”。说得对！但即使是叔本华也承认，音乐基于“可以用数字表达的相当明确的规则，一旦脱离这些规则，音乐就不再是音乐了” ^。2

And this new system has proven surprisingly resilient in the face of all sorts of challenges. By the time we get to Augustine, who wrote a treatise on music in the late fourth century AD, the reduction of music to mathematics is all but complete. He even uses the Latin word numeri (or “numbers”) to refer to rhythm. The pulse of music is now a matter of counting, and the forward motion of a performance a type of calculation. And that’s how matters remained until the African diaspora disrupted this complacent view in the twentieth century. More than two thousand years after Pythagoras, the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz could still define music in essentially the same way as the pre-Socratic sage: our most cherished songs, he insisted, were nothing more than “an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting.” To this, I note with some delight, Arthur Schopenhauer smartly responded that music was actually “an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind is unaware that it is philosophizing.” Touché! But even Schopenhauer accepted that music is based on “quite definite rules expressible in numbers, from which it cannot possibly depart without entirely ceasing to be music.”²

那么在我们这个时代呢？不久前，我采访了一位专门研究前卫古典作曲的学者，他告诉我，他最近在一个会议上因以声音来评价现代作品而受到攻击。他的同行们反复告诉他，应该忽略这些陈词滥调，而专注于所采用的作曲策略。这简直就是毕达哥拉斯，朴实无华，但又符合当今进步主义的品味。即使是站在音乐前沿的反传统人士，也很难摆脱从遥远的过去传承下来的理性主义模式。

And in our day? Not long ago, I spoke to an academic specializing in avant-garde classical composition who told me he had recently been attacked at a conference for assessing modern works by how they sounded. He was told repeatedly by his peers that he should ignore such banal considerations, and focus instead on the compositional strategies employed. This is simply Pythagoras, plain and simple, but updated for today’s progressive tastes. Even the iconoclast operating at the cutting edge of music finds it hard to break away from the rationalistic model inherited from the distant past.

我们应该记住弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫在一个截然不同的语境——分析文学——中提出的警告。他指出，算术的发明是为了帮助理解世界，但最终，“数学超越了其初始状态，仿佛成为了世界的自然组成部分……似乎没有人对外部网络成为内部骨架这一奇特事实感到惊讶。” 事实上，这正是西方音乐在早期毕达哥拉斯学派的转折点（字面意义上也指调音点）所发生的事情。最初帮助我们理解歌曲的比例和比例，变成了定义歌曲的规则和约束。策略和图式通常被视为“真实的”音乐，而实际的声音只有通过对印刷页面内容的忠实表达才能得到验证（参见哲学家纳尔逊·古德曼的美学理论，这是一个极端的例子）。最终的结果是音乐概念化，它排除了远超其允许的内容^。3

We ought to remember the warning Vladimir Nabokov made in a very different context—analyzing literature—when he pointed out that arithmetic was invented to help make sense of the world, but eventually, “mathematics transcended their initial condition and became as it were a natural part of the world… and nobody seems to have been surprised at the queer fact of the outer network becoming an inner skeleton.” In fact, this is exactly what took place in Western music at this early Pythagorean turning point (also, literally, a tuning point). The ratios and proportions that initially helped us grasp songs turned into the rules and constraints that defined them. The strategies and schemas were often seen as the ‘authentic’ music, and the actual sounds only got validation through their allegiance to what was written on the printed page (see the aesthetic theories of philosopher Nelson Goodman for an extreme example of this). The eventual result was a conceptualization of music that excluded far more than it allowed.³

毕达哥拉斯作为西方哲学的奠基人之一，在将西方世界观从魔法转向科学推理方面发挥了重要作用，这在当时也是理所当然的。今天，科学、音乐和魔法这三个领域似乎是独立存在的、互不相关的学科，但在公元前500 年，它们之间的联系对当时的思想领袖来说是显而易见的。任何希望在传统社会中驱逐魔法思维并用科学世界观取而代之的人，都被迫研究音乐理论，因为它也可以被概念化为魔法或科学。在这两种模式之间的任何选择都会产生深远的影响。而且不仅仅是理论：社会会因为如何决定这件事而改变。在毕达哥拉斯之前，歌曲具有神奇的力量。如果毕达哥拉斯和他的追随者希望消除迷信，树立更理性、更合乎逻辑的世界观，他们几乎被迫重新定义音乐实践的所有参数。

It is fitting that Pythagoras also stands out as a seminal figure in Western philosophy and a major force in shifting the worldview of the West from magic to scientific reasoning. Today, these three spheres—science, music, and magic—appear as self-contained and unrelated disciplines, but in the context of 500 BC, the connections between them were obvious to the leading minds. Anyone who hoped to dislodge magical thinking in a traditional society and replace it with a scientific worldview was forced to address music theory, because it, too, could be conceptualized as either magic or science. Any choice between these two models would have profound implications. And not just for theory: society would be altered by how this matter was decided. Before Pythagoras, songs possessed magical potency. If Pythagoras and his followers hoped to eradicate superstition and elevate a more rational and logical worldview, they were almost forced to redefine all the parameters of musical practice.

在我们故事的这个节点，历史记载讲述了一个有趣的轶事：毕达哥拉斯有一天在市场上散步，听到铁匠敲击铁砧的声音。他注意到铁砧发出的各种音调。毕达哥拉斯开始思考数学规则，这些规则或许可以解释不同的音调及其悦耳或不悦耳的特质。受这次偶然相遇的启发，毕达哥拉斯开始尝试拨动不同长度的琴弦，以探究其音调的变化。最终，他首次系统地思考了西方世界对调音和音阶的理解。毕达哥拉斯将市场锤击的噪音转化为音乐，这无疑是一项令人惊叹的成就。我们已经记录了武器和猎物的身体部位是如何构成我们乐器的，但现在我们甚至发现，即使是音乐理论，也是由强大工具的钝力构建而成的。毫不夸张地说，音乐将不再是原来的样子。即使在今天，每个交响乐团在每场音乐会开始时，都会通过调音来表达对毕达哥拉斯的敬意，确保所有乐器都在同一音阶和音调体系中演奏。这是一种根深蒂固的行为，以至于每个参与者——无论是表演者还是观众——都将其视为理所当然。

At this juncture in our story, the historical accounts relate a charming anecdote about Pythagoras walking through the marketplace one day, where he heard the sounds of blacksmiths hammering at their anvils. He noted the various pitches produced by the blows, and started wondering about mathematical rules that might explain both the differing tones and their pleasing or displeasing qualities. Inspired by this chance encounter, Pythagoras began experimenting with the variations in tone between plucked strings of different lengths. The end result was the first systematic considerations of tuning and scales in the Western world. Pythagoras literally transformed noise—of the marketplace hammers—into music, a stunning achievement. We have already documented how weapons and the body parts of prey served as the building blocks of our musical instruments, but now we see that even the theory of music was constructed out of the blunt force of powerful tools. It is no exaggeration to say that music would never be the same again. Even today, every symphony orchestra demonstrates its allegiance to Pythagoras at the start of each concert by tuning its instruments and ensuring that they are all working within the same system of scales and tones. This is such an ingrained behavior that every participant—whether performer or audience member—takes it for granted.

毕达哥拉斯在希腊音乐界的声望，往往掩盖了恩培多克勒这位远为引人入胜的人物的重要性。这位颇具影响力的思想家，约公元前490年出生于西西里岛，与早期毕达哥拉斯学派关系密切，通常被纳入他们的行列。但他与他们之间的差异至关重要——事实上，甚至有些令人震惊。在一篇引人入胜、支离破碎、值得广为人知的文本中，恩培多克勒声称他可以教人们如何“从冥界获得死者的力量”——换句话说，他可以让尸体从坟墓中复活！这可不是我们期待一位哲学家会说的那种话，反而将这位开创性的思想家与我们在世界其他地方（西伯利亚、非洲、澳大利亚等）发现的萨满教传统联系起来。事实上，这一揭露真相的断言令古典主义者深感不安，他们竭力掩盖或诋毁这段文字，甚至称其为伪文本——除了他们对这种迷信观点的厌恶之外，没有任何证据。我注意到恩培多克勒弹奏七弦琴，并在治疗仪式中使用它，并且是西方历史上最后一位以诗歌形式写作的哲学家。我称他为后世学者如此定义他为哲学家，但任何读过现存残篇和传记材料的人，都会有理由将他称为一位音乐贤者或魔法师。他生前的名声与其说是来自他的理论概念，不如说是来自他掌控天气、预防瘟疫的卓越成就。称他为“雇佣巫师”也毫不为过：他随时准备着用音乐和魔法应对各种情况，无论是瘟疫、干旱还是家人的去世^。4

Pythagoras’s renown in Greek music tends to obscure the significance of the far more intriguing figure of Empedocles. This influential thinker, born around the year 490 BC in Sicily, had close connections with the early Pythagoreans and is usually included in their ranks. But his differences from them are crucial ones—in fact, somewhat shocking. In a tantalizingly fragmented text that deserves to be far better known, Empedocles claimed that he could teach people how to “bring from Hades the strength of a man who has died”—in other words, he could raise a corpse from the grave! This is hardly the kind of claim we expect from a philosopher, but instead aligns this seminal thinker with the shamanistic traditions we find in other parts of the world (Siberia, Africa, Australia, etc.). Indeed, this revealing assertion so disturbed classicists that they worked to hide or discredit the passage, even calling it—with no evidence other than their distaste for such superstitious views—a bogus text. I note that Empedocles played the lyre and used it in healing rituals, and was the last major philosopher in Western history to write his works in the form of poetry. I call him a philosopher because that is how later scholars have defined him, but anyone who reads the surviving fragments and biographical material would be justified in labeling him as a musical magi or sorcerer. His fame, during his lifetime, came less from his theoretical concepts than from his renown in controlling the weather and averting epidemics. It’s hardly going too far to call him a “wizard for hire”: he showed up with this music and magic ready for all situations, whether plague, drought, or a death in the family.⁴

这样的人物在西方音乐史上堪称奇耻大辱——但没有什么比将恩培多克勒从人们的视野中抹去，用毕达哥拉斯音乐方法背后的数学理论的冷静论述来取而代之更容易的了。古典学家伯纳德·范·格罗宁根坚称，这种关于死而复生的疯狂段落必定是伪造的。恩培多克勒的译者赫尔曼·狄尔斯承认文本的真实性，但坚称不能照字面理解。在这两种情况下，学者们都致力于净化文本，消除任何与魔法相关的内容。在成熟的科学理性的希腊文化中，这类东西根本不容许存在，因此，音乐史的史册中从未提及恩培多克勒^。5

Such a figure is an embarrassment to Western music history—but nothing is easier than to whisk Empedocles out of view and replace him with a sober account of the mathematical theory underpinning the Pythagorean approach to music. The classicist Bernard van Groningen insisted that such an insane passage about raising the dead must be a forgery. Empedocles’s translator Hermann Diels accepted the authenticity of the text but insisted it couldn’t be taken literally. In both instances, the scholars worked to purify the writings, to eliminate any reference to magic. Such things simply couldn’t be allowed inside the tent of established scientific and rational Greek culture, and as a result, Empedocles is not discussed in the annals of music history.⁵

但在现实生活中，这种名誉扫地的替代方案从未完全消失。就西方音乐而言，颠覆性的魔法元素依然存在于社会边缘，并拥有忠实的追随者，直至现代。即使是毕达哥拉斯的模式也需要融入其中。当世界观发生彻底变革时，情况总是如此：过去不能被完全否定，而是应该将其中最令人反感的方面清除干净。在这种情况下，新的理性主义体系仍然为音乐的潜能留下了微小的空间。因此，关于毕达哥拉斯的流传故事中，不乏他“治愈”病人的记载——尽管这些故事几乎总是关于情绪改善和性格发展，而非生理上的治愈。据说，毕达哥拉斯仅仅通过让一个男人接触另一种音乐，就阻止了他纵火焚烧情妇家的计划。在其他情况下，他通过使用某些旋律来灌输节制和克制的观念。我甚至可以称呼我们尊敬的哲学家他是“情绪音乐”的发明者——显然，他相信情绪状态可以通过适当的音阶来调节——但他并没有触及冥界或使死者复活。毕达哥拉斯革命之后，这类令人尴尬的仪式被排除在了音乐家的创作范围之外。

But, in real life, this discredited alternative has never disappeared completely. In the case of Western music, the subversive magical element persists in the margins of society and retains its loyal adherents, surviving into modern times. Even the Pythagorean model needed to incorporate parts of it. That’s always the case when a sweeping change in worldviews is implemented: the past can’t be denied completely, but instead is cleansed of its most objectionable aspects. In this instance, the new rationalist schemes still allowed a tiny scope for the potency of music. Hence the surviving stories about Pythagoras include accounts of him ‘healing’ the sick—although these are almost always cases of mood enhancement and character development rather than a physiological cure. We are told that Pythagoras stopped a man who planned to set fire to his mistress’s home merely by exposing him to a different kind of music. In other instances, he instilled moderation and temperance via the use of certain melodies. I might even go so far as to call our esteemed philosopher the inventor of ‘mood music’—clearly, he believed that emotional states were regulated through the proper scales—but he stopped well short of trips to the underworld or raising the dead. In the aftermath of the Pythagorean revolution, embarrassing rituals of this sort were excluded from the musician’s toolkit.

然而，恩培多克勒并非个例。他很可能的老师巴门尼德的现存著作中，既有关于预言和治愈的记载，也有关于前往黑​​暗世界的旅程的记述，这与萨满访问冥界的故事有着惊人的相似之处。在这方面，冷静的学者也倾向于不那么令人尴尬的解读。希腊历史上许多其他早期人物——埃庇米尼得斯、克拉佐梅奈的赫尔莫蒂姆斯、阿里斯提亚斯、极北之地的阿巴里斯等等——也可以被描述为萨满。但别指望在音乐史教科书上找到他们的名字。或者想想德维尼纸莎草卷这个不同寻常的例子，这卷卷轴被联合国正式指定为欧洲历史上最古老的书籍。这份于1962年发现的非凡文献，清楚地表明了前苏格拉底时期希腊思想家对魔法的深深敬意，以及他们对传奇音乐家俄耳甫斯的迷恋。他们认为俄耳甫斯不仅仅是一个关于音乐的悦耳神话的主角；对他们来说，他是改变人生的秘传教义的崇敬之源。然而，德维尼纸莎草纸四十四年后才得以出版，即使文字和照片最终得以分享，对这份至关重要的文件的学术研究也进展得非常缓慢。这就是对迷信的勉强回应，尽管它们可能有助于我们理解我们自己的哲学体系和音乐实践的根源。当面对巴门尼德、恩培多克勒以及西方文化史上这一决定性时刻的其他类似人物时，我们的思维模式是将他们贴上思想家的标签——尽管他们现存作品的诗意措辞也为他们赢得了对艺术性的不情愿的尊重。然而，我们应该把他们视为旧制度的最后代表，是音乐魔法的亲身实践者，这种魔法在古希腊很快就失去了信誉，取而代之的是科学理性主义，2500多年后，这种理性主义仍然主宰着我们的日常生活。

Yet Empedocles is hardly an isolated case. The surviving writings of his likely teacher Parmenides include references to prophecies and cures, as well as an account of a trip to a dark realm that bears an uncanny resemblance to the tales of shamans visiting the underworld. Here, too, sober scholars prefer less embarrassing interpretations. A host of other early figures in Greek history—Epimenides, Hermotimus of Clazomenae, Aristeas, Abaris the Hyperborean, and others—could also be described as shamans. But don’t expect to find their names in a music history textbook. Or consider the unusual case of the Derveni Papyrus, a scroll officially designated by the United Nations as the oldest book in European history. This extraordinary document, discovered in 1962, makes clear the deep respect for magic among pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, as well as their fixation on the legendary musician Orpheus. They considered Orpheus as more than just the protagonist of a pleasing myth about music; for them, he was a revered source of life-changing esoteric doctrine. Yet the Derveni Papyrus wouldn’t be published for forty-four years, and even when text and photographs were finally shared, scholarly work on this crucially important document proceeded at a snail’s pace. Such is the reluctant response to superstitious beliefs, although they might help us understand the roots of our own philosophical systems and musical practices. When confronted with Parmenides, Empedocles, and other comparable figures from this decisive moment in Western cultural history, our mindset is to label them as thinkers—although the poetic phrasing of their extant writings has earned begrudging respect for their artistry as well. Yet we ought to view them as the last exponents of the old regime, the hands-on practitioners of a musical magic that would soon be discredited in ancient Greece and replaced by the scientific rationalism that still dominates our day-to-day life more than 2,500 years later.

在历史的同一时期，其他文化中也发生着对一种颠覆性音乐传统的类似“净化”，这仅仅是巧合吗？孔子与毕达哥拉斯生活在同一时代，他收集了现在被称为《诗经》的中国古典民间歌词。他在编纂这部作品中的确切作用仍存在争议，但儒家思想在赋予这些歌曲准官方地位方面的影响是毋庸置疑的。《诗经》共 305 句歌词，作者不详，但这些文本中明显的女性叙事视角表明，其中许多歌词出自女性之手。事实上，这些歌曲有时坦率地表达了女性的情欲和欲望，在任何情况下都必定会令人震惊，尤其是在传统社会中，这些歌词出自女性之口时。儒家学者的回应是强加于文本之上，对其进行道德上高尚的解读，对其含义进行异乎寻常的扭曲，将关于爱情和性的民歌变成了关于善政和父权智慧的伦理论述。这一传统令人反感，因此理论介入，迫使其与统治精英的需求保持一致。将《诗经》与《楚辞》进行比较时，这一点更加明显。《楚辞》是一部另类的抒情诗集，公开吸收了萨满教的观点，但从未达到其儒家前辈的经典地位。毕达哥拉斯和孔子都值得称赞为创新者，但他们也开启了文化清洗的传统，用其他更可接受​​的替代品取代音乐中令人不齿的元素。

Is it just coincidence that a similar ‘purification’ of a subversive musical tradition was taking place in other cultures at this same moment in history? Confucius lived at the exact same time as Pythagoras and is credited with collecting the classic Chinese folk lyrics now known as the Shijing, or Book of Songs. His exact role in the compilation remains a matter of dispute, but the impact of Confucianism in imposing quasi-official status on these songs is beyond question. The 305 lyrics that make up the Shijing come from anonymous authors, but the obvious feminine narrative perspective on display in these texts suggests that women were responsible for many of them. Indeed, these songs sometimes display frank expressions of feminine lust and desire that must have been shocking in any context, but especially when attributed to women in a traditional society. The response of the Confucian scholars was to impose morally uplifting interpretations on the texts, outlandish distortions of their meaning that turned folk songs about love and sex into ethical treatises about good government and patriarchal wisdom. The tradition was scandalous, so theory intruded to force it into alignment with the needs of ruling elites. This is even more evident when the Shijing is compared with the Chu Ci, an alternative compilation of lyric poetry that openly incorporated shamanistic views, and never achieved the canonical status of its Confucian predecessor. Both Pythagoras and Confucius deserve credit as innovators, but they also set in motion traditions of cultural cleansing, a replacement of shameful elements in music with other, more acceptable substitutes.

犹太-基督教世界也经历了类似的净化，对圣经中的雅歌进行了重新诠释。它与儒家诗经有着惊人的相似之处。一首以女性视角创作的歌词受到传统推崇，却又流露出令人不安的性欲表达。文本被强加了一种新的解读，并被赋予了一种与主流信条相符的道德意义，尽管这种解读显得笨拙，在许多观察者看来也难以令人信服。而且，与希腊和中国的例子一样，一位名人的名字被附加在这首如今已神圣的歌词之上。就雅歌而言，这本内容冒险、备受争议的旧约圣经书卷，其作者被认定为所罗门王。他自己。所罗门为何要从一个好色女人的角度来写一首抒情诗，这很难解释，但几个世纪以来，信仰已经取得了更大的飞跃。会众只是接受了这些词的含义并非表面上看起来的那样。

A similar purification took place in the Judeo-Christian world with a reinterpretation of the biblical Song of Songs. The similarities with the Confucian Shijing are uncanny. A song lyric from a female perspective is revered by tradition, but it betrays disturbing expressions of sexual desire. A new interpretation is imposed on the text, and a moralizing meaning aligned with the dominant creed is attached to it, although the fit is awkward and, to many observers, unconvincing. And as with the Greek and Chinese examples, the name of a famous man is attached to the now sacred lyric. In the case of the Song of Songs, that controversial Old Testament book with its dicey content, authorship is assigned to King Solomon himself. Why Solomon would write a lyric from the point of view of a lusty woman is hard to explain, but faith has made bigger leaps over the centuries. The congregation simply accepts that the words don’t mean what they seem to mean.

这种模式在音乐史上将会重演。一种强硬的诠释学，与强大的利益集团勾结，侵入那些备受珍视的歌曲和作品，掩盖颠覆性的暗流。歌词被审查或重新诠释。令人羞耻的歌曲被迫沦为道德宣传品。以毕达哥拉斯为例——他对后期歌曲的影响是所有修正主义者中最大的——一种严谨的数学音乐理论变得规范性而非仅仅描述性，而一种名誉扫地的另类观点，即萨满教和巫术，则被嘲笑和隐藏。然而，它永远无法被完全掩盖。

This is a pattern that will recur in the history of music. A heavy-handed hermeneutics, aligned with powerful interests, intrudes into cherished songs and works to obscure subversive undercurrents. Lyrics get censored or reinterpreted. Shameful songs are forced to serve as moralizing tracts. In the case of Pythagoras—whose influence on later songs would prove the greatest of any of these revisionists—a rigorous mathematical theory of music becomes normative rather than merely descriptive, while a discredited alternative view, shamanistic and magical, is ridiculed and hidden from view. Yet it can never be completely hidden.

我们不应低估毕达哥拉斯音乐理论的颠覆性影响，也不应低估它在诞生之初的争议。在这里，就像人类历史上的许多其他阶段一样，音乐实验与政治改革的呼声联系在一起，那些挑战现状的人冒着生命危险。毕达哥拉斯本人也成为了政治流亡者，也就是我们今天所说的异见人士，而他的门徒最初则被视为危险的乌合之众。在很长一段时间里，他们作为一个秘密教派活动；今天我们甚至可以称之为邪教。克罗顿的许多运动领导人在市政领袖放火焚烧他们聚会的房屋后被烧死。毕达哥拉斯本人可能也死于火灾，尽管说法不一，细节难以确定。一位当代评论员将这起事件描述为与 1993 年联邦调查局围攻大卫·考雷什及其大卫教派在德克萨斯州韦科的住所时发生的大火相提并论。这种比较似乎有些夸张，但这只是因为我们已经吸收了这种古老反主流文化的观点。毕达哥拉斯最终的“合法化”使他的学说进入了主流，并使他成为一个以分析三角形内角关系而闻名的平和人物。但这不应让我们忽视他世界观中更深层次的激进主义。

We should not minimize the disruptive impact of this Pythagorean theory of music, or how controversial it was at the moment of its inception. Here, as at so many other stages in our history, musical experimentation was linked to calls for political reform, and those who challenged the status quo put their lives at risk. Pythagoras himself became a political exile, what nowadays we would call a dissident, and his disciples were initially viewed as a dangerous rabble. For a long period, they operated as a secret sect; today we might even call it a cult. Many leaders of the movement in Croton were burned to death after civic leaders set fire to the house where they were meeting. Pythagoras himself may have died in the flames, although accounts differ and details are hard to pin down. One current-day commentator describes the incident as comparable to the conflagration that killed David Koresh and his Branch Davidian cult during the course of a 1993 FBI siege on their Waco, Texas, compound. The comparison seems outrageous, but only because we have assimilated the views of this ancient counterculture. The eventual ‘legitimization’ of Pythagoras brought his teachings into the mainstream, and turned him into a nonthreatening figure most famous for analyzing the relationships between angles in a triangle. But that shouldn’t blind us to the deeper radicalism of his worldview.

这一点很重要，需要强调。这种新的音乐数学体系最终变得如此强大，几乎席卷了所有替代方法——将魔法和催眠术推到了公认实践的边缘——然而，即使是这种科学方法，最初也是一种颠覆性的运动，当局试图压制和摧毁它。一旦它成为主流，它就会反过来惩罚和审查，以至于我们后来几乎所有关于音乐的认可叙事，无论是其历史还是理论基础，都在某种程度上受到了毕达哥拉斯偏见的扭曲。换句话说，合法化的实践本身就是一种扭曲的行为。

This is an important point, and needs to be stressed. This new mathematical system of music eventually became so powerful that it swept away almost every alternative approach—pushing magic and trance to the margins of accepted practice—yet even this scientific approach was initially a subversive movement that authorities attempted to suppress and destroy. Once it went mainstream, it would punish and censor in turn, so much so that almost all of our subsequent sanctioned narratives about music, both its history and theoretical underpinnings, are distorted to some degree by Pythagorean biases. In other words, the very practice of legitimization is an act of distortion.

在早期阶段，风险和危险是如此明显，以至于根据学者 JB Kennedy 的说法，柏拉图被迫在其著作中隐藏了秘密的毕达哥拉斯密码。Kennedy 可能是疯狂的阴谋论者，也可能是一位才华横溢的古代文献分析家，任你选择。无论如何，他的观点明显偏离了当前主流教义，这些观点基于对现存文献的深入、逐行分析。如果将柏拉图《理想国》的一万两千行分成十二个部分，每部分一千行，每一部分相当于音阶上的一个音符，你会发现其中明确提到了和声、音乐、音高和歌曲，它们恰好在最和谐的音程中重复出现。与战争和死亡有关的阴暗主题则出现在不和谐的音程中。Kennedy 认为，他已经在柏拉图的其他对话中发现了音乐结构，包括《会饮篇》和《游叙弗伦篇》，并认为解开这个密码可以让我们进入一种从古人到我们的时间胶囊。当然，这完全是推测，所发现的模式可能仅仅是巧合。此外，这样的密码对于柏拉图来说，似乎是一种极其迂回的表达观点的方式。哲学的目的难道不就是要清晰地表达，不加混淆或隐瞒吗？然而，《理想国》和其他柏拉图对话录中都包含一些众所周知的段落，苏格拉底在其中为隐瞒信息的必要性和隐藏意义的价值辩护。至于苏格拉底是否担心如果沟通过度，可能会危及自己的生命，显然……嗯，当局下令毒杀他，表明这可能并非毫无根据的恐惧^。6

The risk and danger was so marked, during this early stage, that Plato, according to scholar J. B. Kennedy, was forced to hide a secret Pythagorean code in his writings. Kennedy may be a crazy conspiracy theorist or a brilliant analyst of ancient texts, take your pick. In any event, his views, defiantly outside the mainstream of current teachings, are based on an in-depth, line-by-line analysis of the surviving documents. If you break down the twelve thousand lines of Plato’s Republic into twelve sections of one thousand lines each, each equivalent to a note on a scale, you will find explicit references to harmony, music, pitch, and song recurring at precisely the most consonant intervals. Darker themes, relating to war and death, emerge at dissonant intervals. Kennedy believes he has identified musical structures in other Platonic dialogues, including the Symposium and the Euthyphro, and has suggested that unlocking this code gives us access to a kind of time capsule from the ancients to us. This is, of course, highly speculative, and the detected patterns may be nothing more than coincidences. Moreover, such a code must seem an extraordinarily roundabout way for Plato to make his points. Isn’t the purpose of philosophy to speak unambiguously without obfuscation or secrets? Yet the Republic and other Platonic dialogues contain well-known passages in which Socrates defends the need for withholding information and the value of concealed meanings. And as to any apprehension Socrates might have had about putting his life in danger if he communicated too clearly… well, his execution by poisoning under order of the authorities suggests this might not have been an unfounded fear.⁶

在历史的这一时期，西方社会的其他方面是否也发生了认识论的断裂？人们对待音乐的态度无疑发生了变化，但这很可能是一场更大变革的一部分，这场变革以一系列相关的转变为标志，所有这些转变都是渐进的，但可能在前苏格拉底时代达到了一个临界点。尽管人们试图用最严厉的惩罚，甚至死刑来惩罚异端，但理性思维开始驱散迷信。祭司的宗教取代了萨满的巫术。歌曲越来越多地被用来赞美名人，而不是用来装饰仪式和引发恍惚状态。在这一时期，父权制也变得更加根深蒂固，阳刚之神成为制度化信仰体系的先锋；对生育女神的崇拜并没有消失，但逐渐沦为受教育程度较低者不可信的迷信传说。

Did an epistemological rupture take place in other aspects of Western society at this point in history? Certainly attitudes toward music changed, but these were probably part of a larger transition marked by a host of related shifts, all of them gradual but probably reaching a tipping point around the time of the pre-Socratics. Rational thinking began to dislodge superstition, despite attempts to punish heresy with the most severe penalties, even execution. The religion of priests displaced the magic of shamans. Songs were increasingly employed to praise famous men, rather than to adorn rituals and instigate trance states. Patriarchal institutions also became more entrenched during this period, with virile gods moving to the forefront of institutionalized belief systems; worship of fertility goddesses didn’t disappear, but was gradually relegated to the discredited superstitious lore of the less educated.

希腊文化中存在着一种先前存在的女性价值观文化这一观点至今仍备受争议，而那些倡导这一观点的学者——包括19世纪的JJ巴霍芬和20世纪的玛丽亚·金布塔斯——也引发了激烈的争论和分歧。但与音乐相关的考古证据似乎确实支持了这种转变。在毕达哥拉斯之前，女性在音乐中扮演着核心角色——尤其是我们如今与恍惚状态联系在一起的击鼓——她们的活动充满了仪式感和神秘感。然而，在毕达哥拉斯学派与这一传统的决裂之后，男性成为了音乐文化的守护者，而音乐文化如今已具有了美学、军事和教育意义^。7

The idea of a preexisting culture of feminine values underpinning Greek culture is still controversial, and the scholars who have promoted it—including J. J. Bachofen in the nineteenth century and Marija Gimbutas in the twentieth—have stirred up a hornet’s nest of debate and disagreement. But the archaeological evidence relating to music certainly seems to support a shift of this sort. Before Pythagoras, women played a central role in music—especially the drumming that we have come to associate with trance states—and their activities were infused with ritualistic and mystical associations. Yet after the Pythagorean rupture with this tradition, men emerge as custodians of musical culture, which now takes on aesthetic, military, and pedagogical significance.⁷

如今，我们往往认为鼓手大多是男性。《滚石》杂志当然也认同这一点。2016年，这本颇具影响力的杂志公布了“史上最伟大的100位鼓手”榜单，其中只有五位女性入选。而这些编辑们的选择又能让人感到意外吗？在很多方面，我们都被预设成鼓手是无拘无束的男子气概的体现。然而，如果你在……问同样的问题如果你在前毕达哥拉斯时代，你会得到相反的答案。如果我们根据绘画、雕塑和其他远古时期文物中现存的鼓手形象来判断，我们不得不得出结论，鼓是女性的乐器——无论我们将目光转向埃及、美索不达米亚、希腊、希伯来还是其他早期文化，情况都是如此。这些女性经常被描绘成演奏框鼓，这是一种圆形、浅色、手持的打击乐器，形似谷物筛。事实上，在古苏美尔语中，“鼓”这个词（adapa）也指谷物的计量单位。在对这些社会的研究中，我们一次又一次地发现，音乐、性和生育能力（农作物和动物，而不仅仅是人类）的概念紧密相连。这将是接下来章节中反复出现的主题，但即使在目前阶段，也值得强调的是，女性作为鼓手的角色不能脱离这些其他因素而孤立出来。从非常现实的意义上讲，她的音乐创作既具有仪式性又具有实用性，是一种安抚行为、一种性爱庆典、一种传播工具和一种繁荣的基础。

Today we tend to think of drummers as mostly men. Certainly Rolling Stone believes that. When the influential magazine published its list of the “100 greatest drummers of all time” in 2016, only five women made the cut. And who can feel much surprise at how these editors made their choices? In a variety of ways, we have been preconditioned to view drumming as an expression of unrestrained masculinity. Yet if you asked the same question in the pre-Pythagorean world, you would have received the opposite answer. If we were to judge matters by the surviving images of drummers in paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts from the distant past, we would be forced to conclude that the drum is a woman’s instrument—and that is true whether we turn our gaze to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Hebrew, or other early cultures. These women are often shown playing a frame drum, a round, shallow, handheld percussion instrument that resembles a grain sieve. In fact, the word for drum in ancient Sumer (adapa) can also refer to a measure of grain. In our study of these societies, we see again and again that concepts of music, sexuality, and fertility (of crops and animals, and not just humans) are closely connected. This will be a recurring theme in the pages ahead, but even at this stage it is worth emphasizing that the woman’s role as a drummer cannot be isolated from these other considerations. In a very real sense, her music-making was both ritualistic and functional, serving as an act of propitiation, a celebration of sexuality, a tool of propagation, and a foundation for prosperity.

在女性将鼓交给男性（男性将其转化为与征服相关的军事工具）之后很长一段时间，这种早期状态的痕迹仍然在许多传统社会中徘徊，尤其是在保留萨满教信仰体系的社会中。在西伯利亚，萨满教不仅幸存下来，而且蓬勃发展，这种传承解释了当地文化中一些原本令人费解的元素。观察者常常想知道，为什么依靠鼓（外观与古代图像中的鼓相似）进入恍惚状态的男性萨满会经常穿着女性的服装。但如果他们想要唤起女性担任这些重要角色的早期时代，那么这完全说得通。在世界这一地区，女性萨满的称呼在各个社群中都很相似，而男性萨满则有许多不同的名称。这表明，女性萨满的根源更深远，源于遥远的过去，当时这些语言有着共同的起源。简而言之，积累的证据告诉我们，节奏与魔法的融合在其最早的表现形式中与女性和女性气质密切相关。品质。只有在认识论断裂之后，人类才开始主宰这些实践，而这些实践如今却以半隐蔽的方式存在于一个更加理性的世界的边缘。

Long after women relinquished their drums to men—who turned them into military instruments associated with conquest—signs of this earlier state of affairs lingered in many traditional societies, especially ones retaining shamanistic belief systems. In Siberia, where shamanism not only survived but flourished, this lineage explains otherwise puzzling elements in the local cultures. Observers often wondered why male shamans, who rely on a drum (similar in appearance to those in the ancient images) to enter a trance state, would often dress in women’s attire. But this makes perfect sense if they are evoking an earlier era when females held these important roles. The word for female shaman is similar in various communities in this part of the world, while the male counterpart is called by many different names. This suggests that female practitioners are more deeply rooted in a distant past, when these languages shared a common origin. Put simply, the accumulated evidence tells us that the integration of rhythm and magic is, in its earliest manifestations, closely linked to women and feminine qualities. Only after the epistemological rupture do men come to dominate these practices, which now survive quasi-hidden on the margins of a more rationalistic world.

前毕达哥拉斯时期最著名的音乐创新者是萨福，她常被誉为情歌的发明者和希腊抒情诗的缔造者。巧合的是，萨福去世的年份恰逢毕达哥拉斯出生的年份。某种程度上，她反映了那个时代的最后阶段：音乐与社会需求、性欲/生育欲紧密相连，同时也预示了最终主导西方歌曲的显著个人主义和个人自主性。如今，她的作品主要因其后一种特质而受到赞誉，尤其是萨福预示了我们歌曲的忏悔性质。但如果我们忽略了萨福的抒情诗在诸多方面反映出强硬的希腊理性主义盛行之前的社会现状，我们就误解了她的重要性。在那个时代，歌曲仍然与仪式密不可分，并且更倾向于神秘主义和女性主义的概念。到了柏拉图和亚里士多德的时代，希腊人对这段历史遗产的态度变得矛盾，或许感到尴尬，甚至充满敌意。但萨福在引导我们迎接新秩序的同时，也邀请我们以崇敬的态度对待它。

The best-known musical innovator of the pre-Pythagorean period is Sappho, who is often credited as the inventor of the love song and the creator of the Greek lyric. In a revealing coincidence, Sappho may have died in the same year that Pythagoras was born, and to some degree she reflects the final stages of a world in which music was deeply linked to communal needs and sexuality/fertility, while also anticipating the marked individualism and personal agency that would eventually dominate Western songs. Today her work is mostly celebrated for the latter qualities, and especially for the manner in which Sappho foreshadows the confessional nature of our own songs. But we misrepresent her significance if we don’t also grasp the many ways her lyrics reflect society as it existed before the ascendancy of hard-edged Greek rationalism, a world where song was still inseparable from ritual observances, and more aligned with mysticism and concepts of the feminine. By the time of Plato and Aristotle, the Greeks had grown ambivalent, perhaps embarrassed, or even hostile, to this legacy from the past. But Sappho invites us to treat it with reverence even as she prepares us for the new order of things.

在本书的后面，我们将探讨萨福所引领的西方音乐文化的显著转变，这种转变使音乐家能够歌唱自己。如今，我们认为这是理所当然的。事实上，我们大多数人很难想象歌曲还有其他用途。然而在这个关键时刻，我们需要把握萨福另一面的深刻意义，即她作为准女祭司的角色，她召唤超自然力量，试图表达她所在社群的需求。在这方面，她在现代创作型歌手中是独一无二的，她反映出的价值观和优先事项已经从音乐课程中被抹去——事实上，即使是古人在寻求纯粹、理性的歌曲科学时也试图忘记这些。

Later in this work, we will look at the remarkable shift in Western musical culture, heralded by Sappho, that allowed musicians to sing about themselves. We take this for granted nowadays. In fact, most of us can hardly imagine any other purpose for a song. Yet at this juncture, we need to grasp the deep significance of the other side of Sappho, her role as a quasi-priestess who invoked supernatural forces and sought to express the needs of her community. In this regard, she has no counterpart among modern singer-songwriters and reflects values and priorities that have been expunged from the music curriculum—indeed, that even the ancients tried to forget in their quest for a purified, rational science of song.

阅读《萨福》标准版的第一个残篇——开头是“华丽的宝座上的不朽者阿佛洛狄忒”——我们看到了这种混合世界观的两面。一方面，这首抒情诗通常被视为一首表达萨福心碎的爱情哀歌；然而，文本的大部分内容都是对女神阿佛洛狄忒的祈求。这种个人与神圣的混合在她的作品中反复出现。萨福有两个明显的关注点，它们主导着她的世界观，即使它们揭示了西方思想中隐藏的裂痕：爱的情感纽带，以及对神的共同义务。在西方音乐后来的发展中，这两种方法将偏离各自的传统，彼此之间几乎没有什么关联。你很难想象两种音乐流派的共同点比情歌和宗教赞美诗还要少，但对萨福来说，这两者却紧密相连^。8

Reading the very first fragment in the standard editions of Sappho—which begins with the words “Ornate-throned immortal Aphrodite”—we see both sides of this hybrid worldview. On the one hand, this lyric is typically viewed as a love lament expressing Sappho’s broken heart; yet most of the text is devoted to the invocation of a goddess, Aphrodite. This hybrid of the personal and divine recurs again and again in her oeuvre. Sappho has two obvious concerns, and they dominate her worldview even as they expose a hidden rift in Western thought: the emotional bonds of love, and communal obligations to the gods. In the later evolution of Western music, these two approaches will veer off into their separate traditions and have little to do with each other. You could hardly imagine two music genres with less in common than love songs and religious hymns, but for Sappho these are intimately connected.⁸

早在基督教兴起之前，抒情诗就与这两种思潮失去了联系——我们将看到对神的祈求如何变得公式化，以及抒情诗如何沦为公开赞扬军事领袖和其他权势人物的平台。最奇怪的是，古典抒情诗甚至放弃了与旋律的联系，成为一种用于朗诵和阅读的文本，而不是一首用于音乐表演的歌曲。但在歌曲史的早期阶段，萨福对为国家创作文本、进行宣传或庆祝其军事胜利毫无兴趣。她甚至在第16个残篇中明确地放弃了这种态度。“有人说，骑兵大军，有人说，步兵大军，还有人说，战舰大军，是黑土地上最美的东西，但我说，它是人所爱之物。”她一次又一次地关注她所在社群的精神和情感需求——唯一重要的胜利和失败发生在天堂和心灵中，而不是战场上^。9

The lyric will lose touch with both streams long before the rise of Christianity—we will see how the invocations of divinities become formulaic, and how the lyric turns into a platform for publicly praising military leaders and other powerful men. Strangest of all, the classical lyric will abandon even its connection to melody, becoming a text intended for recitation and reading instead of a song for musical performance. But at this early stage in the history of song, Sappho has no interest in writing texts or propagandizing for a state or celebrating its military victories. She even explicitly renounces this attitude in fragment 16. “Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves.” Again and again she focuses on the spiritual and emotional needs of her community—the only triumphs and failures that matter take place in the heavens and in the heart, not on a battlefield.⁹

当我们回顾萨福之前漫长岁月的歌曲时，这种观点变得更加清晰。即使是抒情诗专家也很少深入挖掘，许多人甚至不知道这一时期的歌曲还留存至今。萨福通常被视为抒情诗的创始人，而她出生前就有大量抒情诗作品流传下来，这令人感到意外。然而，萨福实际上代表着一种几乎可以追溯到……的传统的巅峰。比她登场早了两千年。追溯这条线索的起源，我们便找到了音乐史上第一位作曲家——或者至少是第一位名字流传至今的作曲家。她是一位多么迷人的作曲家啊，尽管她很少出现在音乐史书籍中，甚至在音乐学者中也几乎无人知晓。

This perspective becomes even clearer when we look at songs from the long period before Sappho. Even specialists in the lyric rarely dig back this deeply, and many are unaware that songs have survived from this period at all. Sappho is often viewed as the originator of the lyric, and the idea that there is a significant body of work prior to her birth comes as a surprise. Yet Sappho actually represents the culmination of a tradition that stretches back almost two thousand years before her arrival on the scene. Tracing this thread back to its origins brings us to the very first composer in the history of music—or at least the first whose name has survived. And what a fascinating composer she is, although she appears in few music history books, and has virtually no name recognition even among music scholars.

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公牛和性玩具

Bulls and Sex Toys

我们对美索不达米亚音乐的音色只有极为模糊的概念。少数学者试图利用现存文献和乐器的证据，重现其音色，但他们的努力大多只是在进行富有想象力的重建。然而，这些复原作品拥有一种令人着迷、恍惚的特质，我对此并不感到惊讶。在公元前539年巴比伦覆灭并随后被外来势力统治之前的漫长世纪里，美索不达米亚或许为我们提供了最清晰的例证，展现出一种繁荣的古代音乐文化，这种文化仍然受到魔法和仪式的影响。我们有时将主持这些古代仪式的人称为祭司或女祭司，但在很多方面，他们的精神更接近于萨满，萨满依靠音乐作为米尔恰·伊利亚德所称的“古代狂喜技巧”的重要组成部分^。1

We only have the vaguest notions of what Mesopotamian music sounded like. A few scholars have tried to resurrect its sounds, drawing on evidence from surviving texts and instruments, but their efforts are mostly exercises in imaginative reconstruction. Yet I am not surprised that these restorations possess a mesmerizing, trance-like quality. Mesopotamia, during the long centuries before the fall of Babylon in 539 BC and its subsequent dominance by foreign powers, provides us with perhaps the clearest example of a flourishing ancient musical culture still under the sway of magical, ritualistic influences. We sometimes refer to the people who presided over these ancient rituals as priests or priestesses, but in many ways they are closer in spirit to the shamans who rely on music as a key component of what Mircea Eliade has called “archaic techniques of ecstasy.”¹

尽管我们缺乏关于这些歌曲声音的详细信息，但自从霍尔木兹·拉萨姆于 1853 年发现刻有《吉尔伽美什史诗》的泥板以来，我们已经对该地区古代音乐文化有了大量的了解。《吉尔伽美什史诗》通常被描述为一部诗歌作品，但几乎可以肯定，最早的版本是唱给观众。在新的千年里，我们将继续了解更多。2011 年，伊拉克一家博物馆以 800 美元的价格从一位不愿透露姓名的人士（可能是走私者）手中购得一块泥板，上面刻有 20 行新的《吉尔伽美什诗》。与这些文本一样引人入胜的还有考古挖掘中发现的乐器和相关物品，尤其是伦纳德·伍利爵士在 1922 年至 1934 年间在今伊拉克乌尔皇家墓地进行挖掘时发现的物品。现在我们有大量证据可用于描述这一文化，但这些文本和物品揭示的音乐实践与我们如此不同，以至于专家通常很难将它们与当今关于歌曲在社会中的作用的观念联系起来。

Even though we lack detailed information on the sound of the songs, we have learned an enormous amount about the ancient musical culture of the region since Hormuzd Rassam’s 1853 discovery of the clay tablet containing the Epic of Gilgamesh—often described as a poetic work, but almost certainly sung to its earliest audiences. And we continue to learn more in the new millennium. Twenty new lines of Gilgamesh were found in 2011 on a clay tablet purchased by an Iraq museum from an unnamed individual, probably a smuggler, for $800. Just as fascinating as the texts are the musical instruments and related objects uncovered in archaeological digs, especially those found by Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavations at the Royal Cemetery of Ur, in present-day Iraq, between 1922 and 1934. We now have an abundance of evidence to draw on in describing this culture, yet these texts and objects reveal musical practices so different from our own that it is often difficult for experts to bring them into any coherent relation with current-day notions about the role of songs in a society.

这里有很多奇怪的事情值得思考，但我们先从动物说起。事实上，你很难忽视它们，因为它们无处不在。乐器被设计成动物的样子。在其他情况下，动物图像被作为装饰添加到乐器的表面。现存的艺术作品中也包括动物演奏乐器的描绘。苏美尔文学文本展现了类似的对动物的痴迷——这些生物是诗歌中比喻的最大来源。吞没船只的海浪被描述为吞噬一切的狼。公牛常常被用来表达幸福和力量。公牛的吼叫被用来描述统治者的讲话、神谕的宣告或寺庙繁忙的声音。就好像一种集体的动物狂热在这些人中盛行。

There are many strange things to consider here, but let’s start with the animals. In fact, you can hardly ignore them, because they are simply everywhere. Musical instruments were built to look like animals. In other instances, images of animals were added as decorations onto the surfaces of instruments. Surviving artworks also include depictions of animals playing musical instruments. Sumerian literary texts reveal a similar animal obsession—these creatures are the single largest source of poetic comparisons. Waves engulfing a boat are described as a devouring wolf. A bull is often employed to convey well-being and power. The roar of the bull is used to describe the speech of a ruler, the pronouncement of an oracle, or the sound of a busy temple. It’s almost as if a kind of collective zoological mania prevailed among these people.

学者们提出了各种各样的理论和推测，以解释这些动物音乐家在古代艺术中的角色。面对四足动物演奏乐器的形象，受人尊敬的音乐学家马塞尔·杜切斯内-吉耶曼推测存在“一种世俗音乐”——或许是美索不达米亚半世俗社会的一种狂野爵士乐。“它们的灵感似乎与其说是宗教性的，不如说是滑稽的，”她指出，甚至还发现了讽刺的可能性。但杜切斯内-吉耶曼并不排除相反的理论——即这些古代图像可能纯粹是现实主义的，而表面上的动物只是一个伪装的猎人，试图捕捉猎物。无论如何，她坚持认为此类图像不应被视为任何根深蒂固的信仰体系的代表。相比之下，先锋古物音乐学家弗朗西斯·加尔平（Francis Galpin）则愿意接受其宗教意义，至少对于在乌尔王陵发现的令人印象深刻的公牛里拉琴而言，他只是在狭义上如此。他声称，这些乐器是为了纪念月神南纳（Nanna）或辛（Sin），她是乌尔城的守护神，有时被描绘成一头长着新月角的公牛^。2

Scholars have offered a hodgepodge of theories and speculative notions in explaining the role of these animal musicians in ancient art. Confronted by representations of four-footed creatures playing instruments, esteemed musicologist Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin surmised the existence of “a kind of profane music”—perhaps a type of wild jazz for the Mesopotamian demimonde. “Their inspiration seems less religious than facetious,” she notes, and even detects the possibility of satire. But Duchesne-Guillemin doesn’t rule out the opposite theory—namely, that these ancient images might be purely realistic, and the apparent animal is just a hunter in disguise, trying to capture prey. In any event, she insists that such images should not be viewed as representative of any deeply held belief system. The pioneering antiquarian musicologist Francis Galpin, in contrast, was willing to accept a religious significance, at least to the impressive bull lyres found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, but only in a narrow sense. These instruments, he claimed, celebrate the moon deity, known as Nanna or Sin, who was patron of the city of Ur and sometimes depicted as a bull with crescent horns.²

然而，正如我们从对最早的狩猎社群的考察中所知，动物与音乐创作的关系远比乌尔城邦的出现要古老得多——事实上，拉斯科洞穴壁画的出现比苏美尔城邦早了一万多年。任何受过萨满教和传统社会信仰体系教育的人，都不会接受将这些图像解读为滑稽或讽刺。动物是这些社群的力量源泉，它们既作为食物和原材料的来源提供功能性支持，又作为图腾守护者和供养者提供神奇的帮助。在美索不达米亚，北部地区在其他许多地区都贫瘠的情况下提供了肥沃的牧场，牛必定是经济和宗教活动的核心。在古老的墓葬区，人们经常发现埋葬时带有管状圆柱形印章，印章上刻有动物的图像，尤其是有角的牛，这些印章几乎肯定会为死者在来世带来福祉。甚至有可能，苏美尔最古老神庙前的庭院最初是用来圈养牲畜的，后来才演变成圣林（ temene）。在这种情况下，我们很难对与牛相关的音乐感到惊讶——事实上，这恰恰表明，牛的演奏不仅仅是世俗的，而且与最高权力有着千丝万缕的联系。

Yet, as we know from our consideration of the earliest hunting communities, the relationship of animals to music-making is much older than the city of Ur—indeed, the Lascaux cave paintings predate the Sumerian city-state by more than ten thousand years. And anyone schooled in shamanism and the belief systems of traditional societies will find it impossible to accept the interpretation of these images as comic or satirical. The animal was the source of power in these communities, offering both functional support as a source of food and raw materials and magical assistance as the totemic protector and provider. In Mesopotamia, the northern area offered rich grazing lands in a region where so many other areas were barren, and cattle must have been central to economic and cultic practices. In the old burial areas, people are often found interred with tubular cylinder seals bearing images of animals, especially horned cattle, and these almost certainly were expected to provide benefits in the afterlife to the deceased. It’s even possible that the courtyards facing the oldest temples of Sumer initially served as cattle enclosures, and only later evolved into the temene, or holy groves. In this context, we should hardly be surprised to find music associated with cattle—in fact, that is the very sign that its performance was not merely profane, but inextricably linked to the highest powers.

如果说早期考古学家对这些动物感到困惑，那么性玩具则更让他们感到沮丧。“尼普尔的土堆里散落着许多阴茎象征物，”考古学家兼圣公会牧师约翰·P·彼得斯抱怨道，他于1888年至1895年在伊拉克中部进行了考古发掘。他的同事赫尔曼·希尔普雷希特收集了大量的“阴茎象征物”，“从最粗糙的男性生殖器形象开始”，一直到到“传统的尖刺和锥体”。但这位受人尊敬的亚述学家很快发现，政府官员并不像他那样对古老的阳具充满热情。一位官员拒绝将它们列入文物名录，最终，所有阳具都丢失或被负责保护它们的官员销毁。彼得斯或许暗自庆幸它们的消失，但他仍然从古人的性痴迷中汲取了道德教训，提醒人们注意苏美尔神话与圣经中伊甸园故事的相似之处——他解释说，在这两个故事中，“都是女人用蛇引诱男人进行性行为，使他像神一样成为生命的创造者。” ³

If early archaeologists were perplexed by the animals, they were even more dismayed by the sex toys. “The mounds of Nippur were fairly strewn with phallic emblems,” complained John P. Peters, an archaeologist and Episcopalian minister who conducted excavations in central Iraq from 1888 to 1895. His colleague Hermann Hilprecht put together a huge collection, “commencing with the crudest representation of the male member” all the way to “conventionalized spikes and cones.” But this esteemed Assyriologist soon learned that government officials did not share his enthusiasm for old phalluses. One functionary refused to include them on a list of antiquities, and the whole assortment was eventually lost or destroyed by the very officials responsible for preserving them. Peters was perhaps secretly pleased by their disappearance, but would nonetheless find a moralizing lesson in the sex obsession of the ancients, calling attention to the similarity between Sumerian myth and the biblical story of the Garden of Eden—in both cases, he explained, “it is the woman who with the serpent entices the man to the sexual act which shall make him the producer of life, like to the gods.”³

就在尼普尔遗址发掘之际，詹姆斯·乔治·弗雷泽爵士在其开创性的研究著作《金枝》中，为理解这些丑闻文物提供了一个重要的概念框架。该书最初于1890年分两卷出版，最终扩充为庞大的十二卷本，并于1906年至1915年间出版。现代主义诗人埃兹拉·庞德用一句话精辟地概括了这庞大的研究成果。庞德解释说，我们公认的道德观念“可以追溯到那些认为交配对庄稼有益的人和那些认为交配对庄稼有害的人之间的对立性情”。庞德补充道：“这应该可以简化很多论证。” ⁴

At the very moment that the Nippur excavations were taking place, Sir James George Frazer was providing an essential conceptual framework for understanding these scandalous artifacts in his pathbreaking study The Golden Bough, first published in two volumes in 1890, but eventually expanded into a mammoth twelve-volume version released between 1906 and 1915. The modernist poet Ezra Pound has given us a pithy one-sentence summary of this huge body of research. Our accepted conceptions of morality, Pound explained, “go back to the opposed temperaments of those who thought copulation was good for the crops, and the opposed faction who thought it was bad for the crops.” Then, Pound added: “That ought to simplify a good deal of argument.”⁴

弗雷泽或许简化了问题，但他对古代世界生育崇拜的详细评估，以及他自信地断言通奸与更大社会繁荣之间的联系，也引发了争议。但或许更令维多利亚时代的读者震惊的是，这些仪式的神话——它们颂扬着一位掌管土地生育的死而复活的神——与基督教关于耶稣基督受难和复活的教义之间存在着隐含的联系。很难不得出这样的结论：后一种宗教信条，被信徒奉为福音真理，可以被重新解读为一个更古老的异教神话的相对较新的变体，这种神话在每一个主要的古代文明中都能找到。

Frazer may have simplified matters, but he also created a scandal in his detailed assessment of the fertility cults of the ancient world and in his confident assertions of a link between fornication and the prosperity of the greater community. But perhaps even more shocking to Victorian readers was the implicit connection between the mythology of these rituals, with their celebration of a dying and resurrecting god responsible for the fertility of the land, and the Christian doctrine of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was hard to escape the conclusion that this latter religious tenet, accepted by believers as gospel truth, could be reinterpreted as a comparatively recent variant of a much older pagan myth found in every major ancient civilization.

弗雷泽的批评者经常抱怨他不敬，但从未就他究竟侮辱了什么达成一致。对许多人来说，他不可饶恕的罪过在于将基督教贬低为一种人类学仪式；对另一些人来说，他过分地将复杂的解释强加于前基督教仪式。“弗雷泽比他笔下的大多数‘野蛮人’更加野蛮，”哲学家路德维希·维特根斯坦断言。“他对原始仪式的解释比仪式本身的意义要粗糙得多。”在其他情况下，弗雷泽因将人类暴力和淫欲的行为归咎于季节变化，从而诽谤自然世界而受到严厉批评。人们常常在这些批评中发现，正是这种羞耻或尴尬塑造了几个世纪以来对歌曲和歌词的众多重新诠释。然而，即使其他仪式理论试图超越弗雷泽，它们也总是回归到性与暴力的构成要素——正是这些驱动力支撑着人类音乐创作的诸多变迁。勒内·吉拉尔、沃尔特·伯克特和查尔斯·泰勒等近代思想家，则阐明了古代仪式在引导欲望和复仇欲望方面所起的关键作用，这些欲望和复仇欲望若得不到某种认可的宣泄，就会造成浩劫。但随着这些仪式演变成类似于我们如今所认知的宗教，同样的驱动力变成了令人尴尬的事物，或真正的罪恶，变成了需要惩罚和根除的罪行。这整个过程与本文所描述的音乐的重新定位和重新诠释有许多相似之处。然而，这并不足以让我们感到惊讶：音乐和仪式始终有着紧密交织的历史^。5

Frazer’s critics have often complained he was disrespectful, but have never agreed on exactly what he had insulted. For many, his unforgivable sin was reducing Christianity to the level of an anthropological ritual; for others, he went too far in imposing elaborate interpretations on pre-Christian rituals. “Frazer is much more savage than most of his ‘savages,’” asserted philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. “His explanations of the primitive observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves.” In other instances, Frazer has been castigated for blaming violent and lustful human behavior on the seasonal changes, and thus committing a calumny against the natural world. One often discovers in these critiques the same kind of shame or embarrassment that has shaped so many reinterpretations of songs and lyrics over the centuries. But even as other theories of ritual have tried to go beyond Frazer, they invariably return to the constituent elements of sexuality and violence—the same driving forces that underpin so much of the flux and change in human music-making. More recent thinkers, such as René Girard, Walter Burkert, and Charles Taylor, among others, have cast light on the crucial role of ancient ritual in channeling drives for lust and vengeance that would wreak havoc if not given some sanctioned outlet. But as these rituals evolved into something resembling what we now recognize as religion, the same animating drives became embarrassments, or actual sins, offenses demanding punishment and eradication. This whole process bears many similarities with the repurposing and reinterpretation of music described in these pages. Yet this should hardly surprise us: music and ritual have always shared a closely intertwined history.⁵

就我们的目的而言，我们关注的是这项研究的音乐意义，这不仅对我们理解古代美索不达米亚文化的歌曲至关重要，也对我们理解其他社会的传统至关重要。或许，对我们自己的传统也是如此。事实上，五千年前的生育歌曲和仪式与许多YouTube流行音乐视频的内容有着惊人的相似之处。研究员塞拉·赫尔姆甚至将当代女明星的照片与古代女性的照片并列。苏美尔女神的描绘，旨在指出“古代美索不达米亚人对伊南娜女神的虔诚崇拜与当今美国对名人的虔诚崇拜”之间的相似之处。有时，这种崇拜与仪式性崇拜的联系会清晰地展现出来，例如，当充满幻想的粉丝将性感女星称为女神时，或者当一位流行歌手决定以麦当娜为名，将她半裸的身躯与宗教图像并置时。但即使语言和场景纯粹是世俗的，现代名人崇拜在许多细节上也与古代习俗相呼应^。6

For our purposes, we are concerned with the musical implications of this body of research, essential not only for our understanding of the songs of ancient Mesopotamian culture, but also for our grasp of the traditions of other societies. Perhaps our own, too. Indeed, the fertility songs and rituals of five thousand years ago bear an uncanny resemblance to the content of many pop-music YouTube videos. Researcher Sierra Helm has gone so far as to juxtapose photos of contemporary female superstars with ancient depictions of Sumerian goddesses to point out similarities between “the devotional practices directed towards the goddess Inanna in ancient Mesopotamia and towards celebrities in present-day America.” Sometimes the connection with ritualistic worship is made explicit, as when starry-eyed fans refer to a sexy starlet as a goddess, or when a pop singer decides to go by the name Madonna and juxtapose her semi-naked body with religious iconography. But even when the language and settings are purely secular, the cult of the modern celebrity evokes ancient practices in many particulars.⁶

正如亚述学家格温多林·莱克 (Gwendolyn Leick) 指出的那样，在古代美索不达米亚，“裸体男性形象或阳具象征比裸体女性和阴户描绘相对罕见”。我将现代流行音乐中的这种现象称为鲍勃·福斯 (Bob Fosse) 模因，承认这位著名编舞家在设计将衣冠楚楚的男性（通常穿着正式服装或制服）与几乎全裸的女性并列的舞蹈套路方面的影响。从“Whatever Lola Wants”到“Blurred Lines”等等，这种组合一直是音乐视频和电影中反复出现的奇幻元素。同样的手法在古代美索不达米亚的意象中占主导地位，甚至形式更加明确。女性的性感形象是吸引力的中心。男性的性能力也得到承认，但通常是在其授精特性的背景下。在讨论充斥着露骨性交的核心神话时，莱克补充道：“男性主角通常是年轻力壮的男神，每次性高潮都会受孕。” 在这里，这种可预测的男性性能力不如女性生育能力那么受推崇，音乐和视觉艺术都反映了这一点^。7

In ancient Mesopotamia, as Assyriologist Gwendolyn Leick points out, “nude male figures or phallic symbols are comparatively rarer than naked females and depictions of the vulva.” I have called this same phenomenon in modern popular music the Bob Fosse meme, acknowledging the influence of this celebrated choreographer in designing dance routines juxtaposing a well-dressed man (usually in formal attire or a uniform) and a mostly naked woman. This combination has served as a recurring fantasy in music videos and films, from “Whatever Lola Wants” to “Blurred Lines” and beyond. The same recipe predominated—in even more explicit form—in ancient Mesopotamian imagery. The woman’s sexual persona is the center of attraction. The man’s sexual prowess is acknowledged, but typically in the context of its fertilizing properties. In discussing core myths filled with explicit couplings, Leick adds that “the male protagonists, typically young, vigorous gods, achieve impregnation with each orgasm.” Here this predictable male potency is less celebrated than female fertility, and the music reflects this as much as the visual art.⁷

但在其他方面，这种古老的音乐与我们如今那些充满性暗示的热门歌曲截然不同。这些古老赞美诗中的情色内容一次又一次地与植物和自然世界联系在一起。在描述杜穆兹国王与爱与生育女神伊南娜的性结合时，伊南娜的裸体反复被比作一片需要耕耘的田地。她指的是她的“未开垦的土地……我的高地，水源充足。我自己的裸体，一座水源充足、不断隆起的土丘。”然后问道：

But in other ways, this ancient music is very different from our own sexualized hit songs. Eroticism in these old hymns is, again and again, linked with vegetation and the natural world. In a description of the sexual union of King Dumuzi with Inanna, the goddess of love and fertility, her naked body is repeatedly compared to a field that needs plowing. She refers to her “uncultivated land.… My high field, which is well-watered. My own nakedness, a well-watered, a rising mound.” Then asks:

我，少女——谁来耕耘它？

I, the maiden—who will plow it?

我的赤身裸体，湿润而充满水份的地面——

My nakedness, the wet and well-watered ground—

我这位年轻的女士——谁会在那里放一头牛？

I, the young lady—who will station there an ox?

她的爱人这样回答：

To which her lover responds:

姑娘，愿国王为你犁地。

Young lady, may the king plow it for you.

愿国王杜木兹为您耕耘。

May Dumuzi, the king, plow it for you.

当歌曲达到高潮时，伊南娜惊呼道：“万物之主，请填满我的圣斗士！” ⁸

As the song reaches its culminating point, Inanna exclaims: “The lord of all things, fill my holy churn!”⁸

如今，电台很少会审查内容，但我怀疑，即使在我们如今这个“无所不包”的社会，一首名为《犁我的阴户》（Plow My Vulva）的歌曲也可能让电台主持人被解雇。但古人并不担心他们的赞美诗会被贴上警示标签。性结合是值得庆祝的，而不是羞耻的。简而言之，布莱恩·威尔逊（Brian Wilson）在歌曲中对冲浪的诠释，就像美索不达米亚人对生殖器的诠释一样。即便如此，这些歌曲并非旨在挑逗，或者至少那不是它们的主要功能。它们有着更高的目的：社会的繁荣，甚至国王统治的合法性都岌岌可危。这一点在神圣的婚礼仪式中尤为明显，学者们通常用希腊语称之为“hieros gamos”。在苏美尔人的版本中，国王需要在一个特殊的、重复的场合与女神发生性关系，这个场合可能与新年庆祝活动同时举行。女神的角色由伊南娜的大祭司扮演，与仪式相关的歌曲是从她的角度演唱的。

Very little gets censored on the radio today, but I suspect a song titled “Plow My Vulva” might get a shock jock fired from the station even in our current ‘anything goes’ society. But the ancients didn’t worry about warning labels for their hymns. Sexual union was a cause for celebration, not shame. Put simply, what Brian Wilson did for surfing in his tunes, Mesopotamians did for genitalia. Even so, these songs weren’t designed to titillate, or at least that wasn’t their primary function. They had a higher purpose: the prosperity of the community was at stake, perhaps even the legitimacy of the king’s rule. This was especially evident in the sacred marriage ritual, which scholars often call by its Greek name, hieros gamos. In the Sumerian version, the king was expected to have sex with a goddess on a special recurring occasion, probably held in conjunction with celebrations for the New Year. The role of the goddess was played by the High Priestess of Inanna, and the songs associated with the ritual sung from her perspective.

学者们争论这对夫妇是真的发生了性关系，还是仅仅进行了一次象征性的结合，或许类似于好莱坞电影里模拟的床戏。我怀疑他们的结合是真实的——这次结合的重要性如此之大，仪式中保存下来的细节又如此具体，以至于很难想象它的高潮会是……嗯，真正的高潮。但就我们的目的而言，他们结合的机制远不如伴随的歌曲重要。而这些歌曲几乎没有留下任何想象的空间。“在国王的膝上立着一棵高大的雪松，”一首宗教赞美诗如此唱道。“耕耘我的阴户吧，我心中的男人。”伊南娜命令道^。9

Scholars debate whether the couple really had sex or merely enacted a symbolic union, perhaps something akin to the simulated bed scenes in a Hollywood movie. I suspect that the coupling was real—the importance of this coming together was so great, and the surviving details of the ritual so specific, that it’s hard to imagine its climax as being anything short of… well, actual climax. But the mechanics of their union is less important, for our purposes, than the songs that accompanied it. And those leave very little to the imagination. “At the king’s lap stood the rising cedar,” a religious hymn proclaims. “Plow my vulva, man of my heart,” Inanna demands.⁹

达尔文从未听说过这样的歌曲。早在弗雷泽的研究或伍利的发掘之前，他就提出了关于音乐性起源的论点。但达尔文显然会将这些仪式及其歌曲视为其理论的佐证，即音乐起源于一种确保繁衍的进化机制。当然，他认为人类的歌曲带来了更多婴儿的诞生，而不是牲畜或农作物的增产，但他关于音乐作为生存工具的总体观点与这些后续发现相符。事实上，自他撰写《人类的由来》以来150年积累的证据使得我们很难理解歌曲的演化，除非它不断提及魔法、性、生育和仪式。

Darwin never knew about such songs. He came up with his thesis about the sexual origins of music long before Frazer’s research or Woolley’s excavations. But Darwin clearly would have considered these rituals, and their songs, as confirmation of his theory that music originated as an evolutionary mechanism to ensure propagation. Of course, he believed that human songs led to the birth of more babies, not an increase in cattle or crops, but his general idea of music as a survival tool is compatible with these subsequent findings. In fact, the accumulated evidence of the 150 years since he wrote The Descent of Man makes it hard to comprehend the evolution of song without constant reference to magic, sex, fertility, and ritual.

这正是这位创作型歌手首次登场的背景。恩赫杜安娜 (Enheduanna) 是我们所知的最古老的歌曲作者，其作品流传至今。她是公元前三千年苏美尔城邦乌尔的一位高级女祭司。她创作了 40 多首赞美诗，但这些都不是典型的礼拜歌曲，这也许可以解释为什么“歌曲之母”没有出现在学校教科书中。事实上，如果你把她那些淫秽的歌词给现代的牧师看，他们会被恩赫杜安娜的淫秽歌曲吓坏的。也许许多古代苏美尔人也反对这种音乐——至少从 1927 年伦纳德·伍利爵士 (Sir Leonard Woolley) 发掘出的刻有她肖像的污损雪花石膏圆盘来看是如此。伍利认为，对圆盘的损坏是故意的，尽管这也许不是因为女祭司露骨的歌词。不喜欢或只是害怕恩赫杜安娜的理由有很多。首先，她是阿卡德国王萨尔贡的女儿，萨尔贡以杀戮和亵渎神明而闻名，他或许是圣经中巴别塔幕后主使宁录的原型。但我们还必须思考，这张故意损坏的圆盘是否只是众多其他文化中反复出现的模式的又一个例子，即有权势的男性试图抹去、边缘化或重新诠释女性的歌曲——正如大多数女性的消失所记录的那样。萨福的作品或《诗经》、《雅歌》和其他传统女性欲望表达的男性化诠释。

This is the precise context in which the singer-songwriter first appears on the scene. Enheduanna, the oldest songwriter known to us by name whose works have survived, was a high priestess of the Sumerian city-state of Ur in the third millennium BC. She composed more than forty hymns, but these aren’t your typical songs of worship, and this may explain why the “Mother of Song” doesn’t appear in school textbooks. In fact, if you showed her saucy lyrics to modern-day ministers, they would be horrified by the dirty songs of Enheduanna. Perhaps many ancient Sumerians also objected to this music—at least if we judge by the defaced alabaster disk that contains her image, excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in 1927. Woolley believed that the damage to the disk was deliberate, although perhaps not due to the priestess’s explicit lyrics. There were many reasons to dislike, or simply fear, Enheduanna. First and foremost, she was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, a man famous for both shedding blood and committing sacrilege, who may have served as the inspiration for the biblical Nimrod, mastermind behind the Tower of Babel. But we must also consider whether this deliberately damaged disk isn’t simply one more example of the recurring pattern, found in so many other cultures, of powerful men attempting to erase, marginalize, or reinterpret the songs of women—as documented by the disappearance of most of Sappho’s oeuvre or the masculinized exegeses of the Shijing, the Song of Songs, and other traditional expressions of female desire.

早在荷马时代，歌曲的目的就已被发现，并且在接下来的几百年里其重要性日益增加。《奥德赛》第八卷中，歌手德谟克利特被召去参加宴会，他被要求歌唱“战斗英雄的著名事迹”。毕达哥拉斯革命之后，这个主题成为最受尊敬歌曲的主要目的。抒情诗不再仅仅关注情欲和个人情感，而是更多地赞美强者和权势。萨福可能是当今最著名的古代抒情诗歌手，但希腊人更为推崇她的继任者品达，珍视他的作品，因为它们颂扬了他那个时代的荣耀和最有价值的人物。如今，我们中很少有人会愿意听一首关于富有暴君希伦（Hieron）的歌，他以将秘密警察引入西方生活而闻名，或者关于拳击手罗德岛的狄阿戈拉斯（Diagoras of Rhodes，品达坚称他是宙斯的后裔），他因在奥运会比赛中痛击其他男子而闻名。但正是这些歌曲成就了公告牌（Billboard）排行榜，或者其他古希腊的类似排行榜，从公元前五世纪开始，一直延续了数个世纪^。10

Already by the time of Homer, a different purpose of song can be detected, one that will grow in importance over the next several hundred years. When the singer Demodocus is summoned to entertain at a banquet in the eighth book of the Odyssey, he is expected to sing “the famous deeds of fighting heroes.” After the Pythagorean revolution, this theme becomes the primary purpose of the most respectable songs. The lyric becomes less about erotic longings and personal emotions, and more about celebrating the strong and the powerful. Sappho may be the most famous singer of ancient lyric poetry today, but the Greeks esteemed her successor Pindar far more highly, prizing his works because they celebrated the glories of his age and the worthiest of men. Few of us nowadays may care to hear a song about the wealthy tyrant Hieron, best known for introducing the secret police into Western life, or the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes (whom Pindar insists is descended from the god Zeus), famous for pummeling other men in the Olympic competitions. But this was how you made the Billboard charts, or whatever their ancient Greek equivalent might be, starting in the fifth century BC and continuing for many long centuries afterward.¹⁰

我们今天为什么要关心这个问题？首先，如果我们不理解歌曲这两种截然不同的功能之间持续存在的对立，我们就很难理解我们自己的音乐。为了简单起见，我将强调生育、狂喜和魔法的传统称为音乐中的女性传统。与之形成对比的是，颂扬纪律、社会秩序、强大的男性和群体一致性的音乐，我们称之为男性传统。以鼓乐的历史作用为例，看看它是如何发挥这两种功能的。历史学家约翰·赫伊津哈（Johan Huizinga）曾精辟地指出，当鼓乐被引入军事战役时，骑士和骑士精神的时代就结束了。鼓乐赋予了军队统一性和团结性，但却牺牲了早期战争叙事中如此重要的个人个性。赫伊津哈的时间顺序或许值得商榷——十七和十八王朝的埃及图像描绘的努比亚军鼓手远早于中世纪——但他正确地理解了打击乐作为社会控制工具的力量。然而，鼓也是引发狂喜恍惚状态和打破社会一致性要求的关键因素。后一种击鼓方式在摇摆时代的舞厅和伍德斯托克音乐节上出现，最初与女性有关，这在欧里庇得斯的《酒神的女祭司们》以及其他古代文献和图像中都有明确体现。大量的科学文献支持击鼓的这两种功能——我们的大脑对外部节奏的反应既是自律的来源，也是通往超越的大门。换句话说，这些清晰界定的替代方案不仅是音乐史的指路明灯，也是当代实践的指路明灯。告诉我你是怎么演奏小军鼓的，我就能告诉你你声称自己属于哪一种血统^。11

Why should we care about this today? Well, for a start, we can hardly understand our own music if we don’t comprehend the persisting opposition between these two very different functions of song. Let me label, for the sake of simplicity, the tradition that emphasizes fertility, ecstasy, and magic as the feminine tradition in music. The contrasting approach, celebrating discipline, social order, powerful men, and group conformity, we’ll call the masculine alternative. Take, for example, the historical role of drumming, and see how it can serve either of these functions. Historian Johan Huizinga once made the brilliant observation that the age of knights and chivalry ended when drums were introduced into military campaigns. The drum instilled uniformity and solidarity into the troops, but at the expense of the individual personalities that loom so large in war narratives of an earlier day. Huizinga’s chronology can be questioned—images from the seventeenth and eighteenth Egyptian dynasties depict Nubian military drummers long before the medieval era—but he is correct to grasp the power of percussion as a tool of social control. Yet drums have also been a key source in instigating ecstatic trance states and breaking down demands for social conformity. The latter kind of drumming took place in Swing Era ballrooms, and at Woodstock, and was originally associated with women, as made clear in The Bacchae by Euripides and other ancient texts and images. There’s extensive scientific literature to back up both of these functions of drumming—our brains respond to external rhythm both as a source of discipline and as a gateway to transcendence. These sharply defined alternatives are, in other words, guideposts not just to music history, but also to current practice. Show me how you play a snare drum, and I can tell you which lineage you claim.¹¹

让我们回到古代社会。除非我们理解音乐史上这一断裂的严重性，否则我们很难理解现存文献中关于歌曲的各种评论。例如，柏拉图似乎对音乐表达了矛盾的态度，有时表达了担忧并呼吁禁忌，有时又强调歌舞在教育中的重要性。然而，仔细审视就会发现，他赞扬维护公民美德、引导有序行为的音乐，却又试图消除那些煽动不良情绪、煽动不当行为的歌曲。柏拉图尤其反对音乐哀歌。这看似微不足道，却极具启发性。对垂死之神的哀歌是生育仪式的重要组成部分，即使性不再被考虑在内，这类歌曲仍被认为是女性的专属，她们依靠它们来疏导那些原本可能被压抑的情感。在柏拉图时代之后的近一千五百年里，哀歌屡屡被攻击为一种危险的歌曲体裁，权贵们也对其加以限制。对哀歌的谴责是一个反复出现的主题，例如在中世纪基督教关于“罪恶”音乐的宣言中。直到公元前五世纪初，游吟诗人的兴起十二世纪，过分沉溺于强烈的个人情感，尤其是在歌曲中，被认为是道德软弱的表现；更确切地说，这被认为是女性化的。修辞学家昆体良在罗马帝国初期总结了这种对比，当时他抨击“我们女性化舞台上的淫荡旋律”——他声称这种音乐“甚至不适合一个端庄的女孩使用”——并怀念一个更好的时代，那时音乐被用来“歌颂勇敢的人”。同样，小加图和西塞罗也表达了他们对早期罗马这些充满意识形态色彩的诗歌（carmina conuiualia）的钦佩。这个词有时被翻译为“祖先歌曲”，指的是晚宴宾客为赞美过去的英雄而演奏的音乐^。12

Let’s return to ancient society. Unless we understand the magnitude of this rupture in music history, we can hardly make sense of the various commentaries on songs in the surviving literature. Plato, for example, seems to express contradictory attitudes toward music, at some points expressing apprehension and calling for prohibitions, at others insisting on the importance of song and dance in education. Yet a closer scrutiny shows that he praises music that upholds civic virtues and leads to orderly behavior, but wants to eliminate songs that inflame undesirable emotions and incite improper actions. Plato is especially hostile to musical lamentations. This may seem like a small matter, but it is very revealing. The lament for the dying god was a key part of fertility rituals, and even when sexuality was removed from the equation, these sorts of songs were considered one of the specialties of women, who relied on them to channel feelings that might otherwise remain repressed. Repeatedly, for almost fifteen hundred years after the time of Plato, the lament would get attacked as a dangerous song genre, and restrictions on it were imposed by powerful men. Condemnation of the lament was a recurring theme, for example, in medieval Christian pronouncements on ‘sinful’ music. Until the rise of the troubadours at the dawn of the twelfth century, dwelling excessively on overwhelming personal emotions, particularly in song, was considered a sign of moral weakness; even more to the point, it was deemed womanish. The rhetorician Quintilian summed up this contrast at the dawn of the Roman Empire, when he attacked “the lascivious melodies of our effeminate stage”—music that he claimed was “unfit even for the use of a modest girl”—and looked back with nostalgia on a better age, when music was employed “to sing praises of brave men.” In a similar vein, Cato and Cicero expressed their admiration for these ideologically charged carmina conuiualia of early Rome. This term is sometimes translated as “ancestral songs” and refers to music performed by dinner guests in praise of heroes from the past.¹²

再次，我们需要考虑葬礼仪式，才能充分理解这种优先顺序转变的影响。古代和中世纪的权威人士对音乐哀歌的厌恶程度惊人地一致，并试图阻止女性吟唱这种哀歌长达一千多年。这种音乐的反对者在根除悲伤和哀悼之歌方面几乎没有成功，至少从他们反复攻击的坚持来看是如此。但古人求助于一种替代品，他们将其提升到卓越的地位，并努力为后世传承：赞美死者功绩的颂歌。吟游诗人被招募来演唱这些令人振奋的歌曲，以取代泪眼婆娑的哀歌。死亡的场合现在变成了我们所谓的“教育时刻”——一个通过合适的音乐，在旁观者心中灌输“男子气概”美德的机会。

Here again, we need to consider funeral rituals to grasp the full impact of this shift in priorities. The ancient and medieval authorities are surprisingly consistent in their distaste for musical lamentations and tried to prevent women from singing them for more than a thousand years. The enemies of this music had little success in eradicating songs of grief and mourning, at least judging by the persistence with which they needed to repeat their attacks. But the ancients had recourse to a substitute that they elevated to a position of preeminence and strived to preserve for posterity: the laudatory song praising the deeds of the dead. Bards were enlisted to perform these uplifting alternatives to weepy-eyed lamentations. The occasion of death now became what we might call a “teachable moment”—a chance to instill ‘manly’ virtues, by means of suitable music, in the hearts and minds of the onlookers.

如今，我们却颠倒了这些优先顺序。我们现在期望歌曲能够表达个人情感，尤其是最私密的情感。现代听众并非不了解自夸和赞美之歌——它们在嘻哈音乐（与品达等人的古代赞美诗有着惊人的相似之处）以及卡利普索和其他一些音乐类型中盛行——但除了少数例外，这种自吹自擂的吟游诗人行为只在流行音乐的边缘地带盛行。任何歌颂政治家或军事行动的歌曲，都我们感到不安，进入了一个在最坏的情况下类似于宣传，在最好的情况下也应该属于历史学家和社会科学家研究的领域。从热门唱片和YouTube观看次数来看，我们又回到了更古老的范式，将音乐视为性（尤其是女性性）和深层情感的表达。以一种奇怪的方式，我们又回到了美索不达米亚先辈们的优先考虑事项。

We have flip-flopped these priorities today. We now expect songs to express personal feelings, especially the most intimate kind. Songs of boasting and praise aren’t unknown to modern listeners—they flourish in hip-hop (which reflects a surprising number of similarities with the ancient songs of praise by Pindar and others), as well as in calypso and a few other genres—but, except for this handful of exceptions, such exercises in braggadocious bardic behavior thrive only on the periphery of popular music. And any song that celebrates a politician or a military campaign makes us uneasy, entering a sphere that, at worst, resembles propaganda, or at best ought to be the domain of historians and social scientists. Judging by hit recordings and YouTube views, we have returned to the much older paradigm that sees music as an expression of sexuality, especially female sexuality, and deeply felt emotions. In a strange way, we have returned to the priorities of our Mesopotamian predecessors.

6

6

讲故事的人

The Storyteller

我们现在确定了音乐史上的一条战线。这条战线将在数个世纪中以惊人的持久性重现。一方面，我们遇到了秩序与纪律的音乐，它们追求数学的完美，并与制度特权相符。另一方面，我们发现了充满强烈情感的音乐，它们常常与魔法或恍惚状态联系在一起，并且抵制来自上层的控制。第二种音乐通常仅以暗示、片段或某种受损状态存留下来。这体现了文化精英是如何看待它的——或者或许是担心这样描述更准确。

We have now identified a battle line in music history. And this battle line will reappear, with surprising persistence, over the centuries. On the one hand, we encounter the music of order and discipline, aspiring to the perfection of mathematics and aligned with institutional prerogatives. On the other, we find music of intense feelings, frequently associated with magic or trance states, and resistant to control from above. This second kind of music often survives merely in hints and fragments or in some otherwise impaired condition. That tells you how cultural elites viewed it—or perhaps feared it would be a more accurate descriptor.

我们被教导要以不同的视角看待这场战争。最熟悉的区分音乐的方式是将其视为高雅与低俗之间的竞争。我们被告知，选择是在交响乐厅的精致音乐和大众的民粹曲调之间。但正如我们已经看到的，这种看待冲突的方式忽略了最本质的要素，除非我们抓住真正的关键问题，否则我们永远无法理解歌曲为什么人类拥有如此强大的力量来破坏社会规范，或者为什么冲突会在几个世纪的时间里一次又一次地发生。

We have been taught to view the battle lines differently. The most familiar way of distinguishing music is as a competition between highbrow and lowbrow. The choice, we are told, is between the sophisticated music of the symphony hall and the populist tunes of the masses. But as we have already seen, this way of viewing the conflict misses the most essential elements, and unless we grasp the real issues at stake we will never comprehend the reasons why songs possess such power to disrupt social norms, or why the conflicts recur again and again over the course of centuries.

但故事的奇特之处在于：音乐界的权力掮客们若不定期地从他们想要排除的那些声名狼藉的歌曲中汲取能量，就无法生存。这正是音乐史的发动机室。局外人和各种边缘群体的激烈歌曲蕴含着力量，这种力量不容忽视。这就像处理某种危险的放射性物质，它可能为整座城市提供能源……也可能在出现问题时将其炸毁。这是一种很好的音乐概念：你想要它，需要它，但它也伴随着危险警告。

But here’s the peculiar twist to the story: the institutional power brokers in music can’t exist without periodic infusions of energy from the disreputable songs they want to exclude. This is the engine room of music history. The intense songs of outsiders and various marginalized groups possess power, and that power can’t be ignored. It’s like handling some dangerous radioactive substance that might provide energy for the entire city… or blow it up if things go wrong. That’s a good way of conceptualizing music: you want it and need it, but it comes with a hazard warning.

希腊人在试图将抒情诗转化为精英阶层和机构的宣传工具时，亲身体验到了这一点。品达被尊崇为最伟大的抒情诗人，他的作品被学生们熟记，并在宴会和其他盛大场合演奏，然而这些歌曲对民众的影响究竟有多大，仍是一个悬而未决的问题。品达去世后不久，即公元前五世纪下半叶，古希腊文明正处于鼎盛时期，喜剧作家尤波利斯就不得不承认，这位受人尊敬的诗人的作品很少被人听到，因为民众并不关心它们。希腊人想要创造一种安全、受人尊敬的歌曲，随着时间的推移，甚至连音乐也被从抒情诗中移除，以确保一切都井然有序。歌曲变成了纯粹的文本，失去了旋律。但随着抒情诗越来越受人尊敬，它失去了情感强度以及它的大部分影响力和激励力量。

The Greeks learned this firsthand when they tried to turn the lyric into a type of propaganda for elites and institutions. Pindar was held up for admiration as the greatest of the lyric poets, and his works were memorized by students and performed at banquets and other stately occasions, yet it remains an open question how much influence these songs exerted on the populace. Not long after Pindar’s death, in the second half of the fifth century BC when ancient Greek civilization was at the height of its glory, the comic writer Eupolis already had to admit that the esteemed poet’s works were seldom heard because the masses didn’t care for them. The Greeks wanted to create a safe, respectable kind of song, and over time, even the music was removed from the lyric, to ensure that everything would be neat and orderly. Song got turned into mere text, drained of melody. But as the lyric gained respectability, it lost emotional intensity and much of its power to influence and inspire.

即使品达的作品，我们也不确定他在作品的演绎中扮演了什么角色，也不确定这些作品是为合唱团还是独唱歌手创作的；如果是独唱歌手，品达本人是否就是主唱。或许他像欧文·柏林、科尔·波特以及其他现代的“音乐匠”一样，默默地创作歌曲供他人演绎。又或许他像交响乐指挥家一样，负责训练和指导演出。我们无法确切地断言，但我们绝对可以肯定。确信他的歌词维护了领导人和统治机构的威望，并被用作教育工具。

Even with Pindar, we aren’t sure what role he played in the performance of his works, or whether they were intended for chorus or solo singer, and, if the latter, whether Pindar himself was the vocalist. Perhaps he was a behind-the-scenes presence, like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths in modern times, crafting songs for others to perform. Or maybe he trained and directed the performance, akin to a symphony conductor. We simply can’t say with any assurance. But we know with absolute certainty that his lyrics upheld the prestige of the leaders and ruling institutions and were used as pedagogical tools.

随着抒情诗和其他歌曲越来越成为一种教学内容，它们逐渐演变成一种可以书写和口述的东西，而不再是融入音乐和舞蹈的充满活力的表演。到了抒情诗人贺拉斯——他可能是罗马社会中最接近品达的人——这些文本显然是作家而非歌手的作品。作者可能仍然采取音乐表演者的姿态。我们在《埃涅阿斯纪》的开篇和许多其他没人指望被唱出来的古典诗歌中发现了“我歌唱”这句话。在贺拉斯的传记中，我们只发现一次他真正参与了诗歌的音乐表演，那是奉奥古斯都皇帝本人的命令。只有在这种情况下，我们才能确定这位拉丁文学中最著名的抒情诗人确实创作了我们如今所说的抒情诗，即歌曲的歌词。

As lyrics and other songs became more embedded as teachable moments, they gradually evolved into something you wrote and spoke, no longer a vibrant performance integrated into music and dance. By the time we arrive at the lyric poet Horace—perhaps the closest equivalent to Pindar in Roman society—these texts are clearly the work of writers, not singers. The authors may still adopt the pose of a musical performer. We find the phrase “I sing” in the opening line of the Aeneid and many other classical poems that no one expects to be sung. In Horace’s biography, we find only one instance when he took part in an actual musical performance of his poetry, and that was by order of Emperor Augustus himself. This is the only situation in which we can be certain that the most famous lyricist in Latin literature actually composed what we nowadays call a lyric, namely, the words to a song.

叙事歌曲比抒情歌曲更能传授道理，抒情歌曲一直更依赖于情感共鸣而非叙事清晰度来达到效果，因此被证明特别适合于制度和等级制度的需求。叙事歌曲保存了历史知识和宗教教条。它们以非凡的精确度将珍贵的神话、文化信仰和核心学习代代相传——你可以称它们为古代的云存储。如果目标是赞扬值得赞扬的人（在这些社会中通常如此），那么叙事歌曲是无与伦比的。最著名的类型，史诗，建立在英雄事迹的魅力和激动人心之上。最重要的是，叙事歌曲在实现所有这一切的同时，也是一种消遣和娱乐。正因为如此，它可以支持权力结构和精英特权，而听众几乎没有意识到这些目的已经达到。

Storytelling songs could teach lessons much better than the lyric, which had always relied more on emotional resonance than narrative clarity for its effects, and thus proved especially well suited for institutional and hierarchical needs. Storytelling songs preserved historical knowledge and religious dogma. They propagated treasured myths, cultural beliefs, and core learnings from generation to generation with extraordinary precision—you could call them the cloud storage of antiquity. And if the goal was to praise worthy men, as often was the case in these societies, the story song was unsurpassed. The most famous type, the epic, was built on the allure and excitement of heroic deeds. Best of all, the story song achieved all this while serving as diversion and entertainment. For this very reason, it could support power structures and elite privileges with listeners hardly aware that these purposes were served.

如果你怀疑歌曲作为数据存储媒介的有效性，不妨想想毛利儿童的例子。他们保留着丰富的童年记忆——事实上，在所有受测文化中，他们的记忆力最强。他们社区成员最早记忆的形成时间平均为2.5岁。但当这些人被问及最早记忆的细节时，他们往往以不同于其他文化背景的人的方式描述这些记忆。毛利人更有可能将这些回忆与家庭故事联系起来，而较少提及照片和纪念品。母亲们经常给孩子们讲述她们的“出生故事”，将家庭新成员的到来转化为一个个故事。通过这种方式，即使是个人的身份认同感也植根于故事的讲述之中。其他重要的事件，例如旅行或郊游，也以这种方式保存下来——不是作为剪贴簿中的图像，而是作为家庭单元既定传说的一部分。即使视觉记忆消逝很久，听到（或唱出）的故事的听觉记忆依然留存^。1

If you doubt the efficacy of songs as a data storage medium, consider the case of Maori children, who retain rich memories of their early childhood—in fact, they have the greatest recall of any culture measured. The average date of the first memory for members of their communities is 2.5 years of age. But when these individuals are questioned about the details of their oldest memories, they tend to describe them in different ways from people of other cultures. Maori are far more likely to connect these recollections to family stories, and less likely to refer to photographs and memorabilia. Mothers often tell children their ‘birth story,’ in which the arrival of a new member of the family is turned into a narrative. In this way, even an individual’s sense of personal identity is grounded in storytelling. Other prominent incidents, such as trips or outings, are also preserved in this way—not as images in a scrapbook, but as part of the established lore of the family unit. Long after visual memories fade, the aural memories of a heard (or sung) tale remain.¹

很难不得出这样的结论：讲故事塑造我们大脑的方式，即使是家庭电影和全家福等震撼人心的图像也无法与之相比。在现存的狩猎采集社会中进行的实地考察告诉我们，讲故事的技能是这些社群中最受重视的才能之一。人类学家安德里亚·米利亚诺对菲律宾狩猎采集群体阿格塔（Agta）的三百名成员进行了调查。她要求每个人从他们的社群中挑选五位他们最想与之共处的成员。她预计他们会选择那些狩猎技巧最娴熟、体力最强、或是医术最精湛的人。事实上，她发现阿格塔人重视讲故事胜过所有其他技能。她得出结论，这些故事不仅仅是娱乐性的故事，更是群体生存和日常活动能力的关键因素。一句古老的谚语告诉我们，一张图片胜过千言万语，然而就我们个人发展而言，文字似乎具有更持久的影响——但前提是它们必须融入故事之中。

It is hard to escape the conclusion that storytelling shapes our brains in ways that even powerful images, such as home movies and family portraits, cannot match. Fieldwork in surviving hunter-gatherer societies tells us that storytelling skills are among the most prized talents in these communities. When anthropologist Andrea Migliano surveyed three hundred members of the Agta, a group of hunter-gatherers in the Philippines, she asked each individual to pick five members of their society that they would most want to live with. She expected that they would prefer those most skilled in hunting, or with the greatest physical strength, or perhaps with the most detailed medical knowledge. In fact, she learned that the Agta valued storytelling above all other skills. She concluded that these stories were more than just entertaining tales, but were key contributors to the survival and functional capabilities of the group. An old adage tells us that a picture is worth a thousand words, yet in terms of our personal development, the words seem to have the more lasting impact—but only if they are embedded in a tale.

部落长老记忆长篇故事的能力已被广泛记录，但他们保存科学知识的能力也同样令人印象深刻，尽管鲜为人知。纳瓦霍部落成员与动物学家合作，对原住民领地内的昆虫进行分类时，借鉴了动物学家的歌谣和民间传说，对超过700个物种进行了描述。菲律宾民都洛岛的哈努诺部落在植物鉴定方面比合作的受过训练的植物学家更胜一筹。他们最终对1625种植物进行了分类，并提供了关于其药用特性和食用适宜性的深入信息。居住在巴西和秘鲁边境亚马逊雨林的马塞斯一家最近决定将他们对传统医学的集体记忆记录下来——这一过程最终成就了一部500页的百科全书^。2

The ability of tribal elders to remember long stories has been widely documented, but their skill in preserving scientific knowledge is just as impressive, if less well known. When members of the Navajo tribe collaborated with zoologists in classifying the insects in their native territories, they drew on their songs and folklore in providing descriptions of over 700 species. The Hanunóo tribe on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines proved far more skilled at identifying plants than the trained botanists who collaborated with them—they eventually classified 1,625 plants and provided in-depth information on their medicinal properties and suitability as food. The Matsés, who reside in the Amazonian rainforest on the frontier between Brazil and Peru, recently decided they should document their collective memories of traditional medicine in print—a process that resulted in a 500-page encyclopedia.²

尽管这些社区相隔千里，但他们却依靠一套惊人相似的文化工具来保存积累的知识。歌曲是这一过程的关键部分。“一位原住民长者可能知道一千首歌曲，”研究员琳恩·凯利指出。“歌曲必须编码每一种地貌特征和每一种资源，而不仅仅是植物和动物。长者需要知道在哪里可以找到燧石、黑曜石、盐和赭石，而在没有道路的地形中导航的能力，对于收集和交易这些资源至关重要，因为这些地形在各个方向上往往看起来都一样。” 古代记忆研究的顶尖专家已经注意到将事实与物理位置（无论是真实的还是想象的）联系起来的力量——这种技巧早在16世纪就对耶稣会传教士利玛窦（Matteo Ricci）奏效，许多人认为他是一位巫师，因为他能够通过他的“记忆宫殿”技巧回忆起冗长的文本和单词表（如果被要求，他也可以倒序背诵）。这种方法至今仍是八届世界记忆冠军多米尼克·奥布莱恩（Dominic O'Brien）的基石记忆法宝。“所有现代记忆冠军都使用同样的方法，”凯利指出，“因为还没有找到更有效的方法。” ³

Although these communities are separated by thousands of miles, they rely on a surprisingly similar set of cultural tools to preserve their accumulated knowledge. Songs are a key part of this process. “An Aboriginal elder might know a thousand songs,” notes researcher Lynne Kelly. “Songs must encode every landscape feature and every resource, not just the plants and animals. Elders need to know where to find flint and obsidian, salt and ochre, while the ability to navigate across terrain with no roads, that often appears the same in all directions, is critical to collecting these resources and to trading them.” The leading experts on memory dating back to ancient times have noted the power of connecting facts to physical locations, whether real or imagined—a technique that worked back in the sixteenth century for Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, whom many considered a wizard because of his ability to recall lengthy texts and word lists (which he could also recite in reverse order, if requested) via his “memory palace” technique. This method is still the foundational mnemonic trick for eight-time world memory champion Dominic O’Brien in the current day. “All modern memory champions use the same method,” Kelly notes, “as no more effective method has been found.”³

歌曲与实体里程碑的结合在存储信息方面尤其有效——但对于不了解这种技术威力的外人来说，却令人费解。野生动物生态学家苏·丘吉尔在与部落长老合作时亲身体验了这种技术的有效性。部落长老对澳大利亚歌曲的了解，引导她研究穴居蝙蝠的栖息地。她驾驶着一辆老旧的陆地巡洋舰，没有地图，去寻找长老们多年未曾踏足的洞穴。有一次，他们需要穿越一百公里的沙丘，“到达一个洞穴，如果你站在距离洞穴小垂直方向三米以上的地方，就看不见它。”“入口，”丘吉尔写道。“给我们引路的老人根据沙丘的形状导航。他们时不时会停下来，唱一首长歌，帮助他们记住旅途中的地标。”这些是他们年轻时学过的歌，几十年后，它们仍然像路标一样指引着我们^。4

The combination of songs and physical milestones is especially powerful in storing information—but mystifying to outsiders unaware of the power of this technique. Sue Churchill, a wildlife ecologist, discovered its efficacy firsthand when working with tribal elders whose expertise with the Australian songlines guided her research into the habitats of cave-dwelling bats. She was traveling without maps in an old Land Cruiser in search of caves the elders had not visited in years. At one point, they needed to cross one hundred kilometers through sand dunes “to a cave that couldn’t be seen if you stood more than three meters from its small vertical entrance,” Churchill wrote. “The old men who guided us were navigating by the shape of the sand dunes. They would stop every now and then and sing a long song to help them remember the landmarks of the journey.” These were songs they had learned as young men, but they continued to serve as guideposts decades later.⁴

其他文化也依赖手工制品来发挥同样的作用。在西伯利亚，鄂温克人成功地在一根有缺口的棍子上“存储”了七百首歌曲。在美洲原住民社区，串珠腰带也能发挥类似的作用。对于殖民前中非的卢巴帝国来说，重要的信息是借助卢卡萨（ lukasa ）来保存的。卢卡萨是一种记忆板或记忆棒——即使是这种随意的描述也会让人联想到半导体和USB设备——上面装饰有浮雕或嵌入珠子和贝壳，以扩大其存储容量。

Other cultures have relied on handmade objects to fill this same role. In Siberia, the Evenki managed to ‘store’ seven hundred songs on a notched stick. In Native American communities, beaded belts could serve a similar function. For the Luba Empire in precolonial Central Africa, important information was retained with the help of the lukasa, a kind of memory board or memory stick—even this casual description summons up mental images of semiconductors and USB devices—decorated with carved reliefs or embedded beads and shells to expand its storage capacity.

琳恩·凯利如今认为，巨石阵以及其他类似的建筑，为那些从游牧狩猎生活转变为定居农耕生活的族群，提供了一种保存部落记忆的方式。由于担心丢失宝贵的信息，他们建造了更紧凑的地标，以便作为记忆的占位符。如此一来，这些石头就成了传统记忆棒的放大版。现代研究人员哀叹，建造巨石阵的人不识字，因此没有留下任何文献。但在这种情况下，幸存的巨石或许正是这些文献不复存在的原因。根据这一假设，我们只是缺少了巨石阵建造之初旨在保存的歌曲和知识。

Lynne Kelly now believes that Stonehenge, and other formations like it, served as a way of preserving tribal memories for groups that had shifted from nomadic, hunting lifestyles to stable farming lives in one location. Fearing they would lose valuable information, they constructed more compact landmarks that could be used as mnemonic placeholders. In this way, the stones were large-scale equivalents of the traditional memory sticks. Modern-day researchers lament that the people who created Stonehenge were nonliterate, and thus left behind no documents. But in this instance, the surviving stones may be the very reason why such texts do not exist. Under this hypothesis, we simply lack the songs and knowledge that the stones were built to preserve.

我之所以深入探讨这些问题，是为了阐明我们多么低估了歌曲的力量，我们被教导将其视为一种纯粹的娱乐工具。当我们发现某种歌曲拥有特殊的力量时，无论是因为它储存信息、塑造行为，还是对社区产生其他影响，我们都需要探究权力掮客们是如何争夺其影响力和范围的。讲故事或许看似只是另一种娱乐形式，但这些歌曲却可能事关生死，激发战争、浪漫冒险以及其他数百件重大事件。如果你找到了控制这些歌曲的方法歌曲，你可以塑造整个社区的行为并保护你自己的地位或权威。

I dwell on these matters to make clear how much we underestimate the power of song, which we are taught to view as a mere tool of entertainment. And when we find a particular kind of song that possesses a special potency, whether because it stores information or shapes behavior or exerts some other impact on the community, we need to look for the ways in which power brokers fought to control its scope and influence. Storytelling may seem like merely another form of entertainment, but these songs could be a matter of life or death, inspiring wars and romantic escapades and a hundred other momentous events. If you found a way to control these songs, you could shape the behavior of entire communities and protect your own position of status or authority.

即使是有文字的社会也知道，故事和文化传说以歌曲的形式保存下来会更有生命力。而这个事实的终极证明就是这些故事至今仍幸存下来。我们对古希腊人的了解大部分来自伟大的歌唱史诗《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》。1853 年发现的《吉尔伽美什史诗》通常被认为是现存最古老的主要文学作品，是亚述学史上最重大的突破。目前尚不清楚印度史诗《摩诃婆罗多》和《罗摩衍那》起源于朗诵还是音乐表演，但我倾向于相信希腊演说家狄奥·克里索斯托姆（生于约公元40 年）的评论“荷马的诗歌甚至在印度也被传唱，在那里人们把它翻译成自己的语言”实际上指的就是这些梵语作品。在这些以及许多其他例子中，歌唱的故事已经流传了数千年，如今已成为研究神话、文学、历史以及音乐（奇怪的是，最后一个因素很少被提及）的基础文本^。5

Even literate societies learned that stories and cultural lore become more resilient when preserved in the form of songs. And the ultimate proof of this fact is the very survival of these stories in the current day. Much of what we know about the ancient Greeks comes from those great sung epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. The 1853 discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, often considered the oldest surviving major literary work, is the most significant breakthrough in the history of Assyriology. It’s unclear whether the Hindu epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana originated as recitations or musical performances, but I tend to believe that the comment by the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (born circa AD 40), that “Homer’s poetry is sung even in India, where they have translated it into their own speech and tongue,” actually refers to these Sanskrit works. In these and many other instances, sung stories have survived for thousands of years, and now serve as foundational texts in the study of myth, literature, history, and—how peculiar that this last ingredient is rarely noted—music.⁵

最后一点显而易见，但如果你查阅十到二十部最具影响力的史诗学术著作，你会发现其中没有一部出自音乐学者之手。事实上，如今我们很少依赖歌曲讲述故事，从而淡化了这些传统曾经紧密结合的程度。相反，我们期待歌曲能够传达强烈的个人情感片段。这些情感通常与爱有关——我们90%最珍爱的旋律背后的灵感都源于爱。但在紧要关头，另一种强烈的情感也能满足需求。对于朋克摇滚歌手来说，可能是愤怒；对于说唱歌手来说，可能是反抗；对于乡村歌手来说，可能是开着皮卡驶向夕阳时的那种孤独感。但如今的歌曲需要强烈的情感，没有这种情感，你就找不到听众，也就无法成为热门歌曲。

That last fact would seem obvious, yet if you track down the ten or twenty most influential academic works on epics, you will find that not one was written by a music scholar. Indeed, we rarely rely on songs to tell stories nowadays, and thus minimize how closely integrated these traditions once were. Instead, we expect songs to convey vignettes of intense personal emotion. These most frequently relate to love—the inspiration behind around 90 percent of our most cherished melodies. But in a pinch, another powerful feeling can suffice. For a punk rocker, it might be anger, for a rapper it could be defiance, for a country singer it may be that lonesome feeling you get when you drive a pickup truck off into the sunset. But a song in the current day needs a powerful emotion, and without that you won’t find an audience, and you don’t have a hit.

但如果音乐专家忘记了史诗，文学学者就不得不考虑音乐的重要性。事实上，我们学术领域最大的突破对史诗和口头传承的理解，最初是在咖啡馆的音乐娱乐中产生的。不，我并没有夸张。20世纪30年代中期，哈佛大学古典学家米尔曼·帕里和他的学生阿尔伯特·洛德离开了图书馆和档案馆，在他们创作音乐的实际场所寻找最后一批在世的吟游诗人，改变了我们对荷马史诗和传统史诗起源的理解。即使在从口头文化向文字文化转变的后期阶段，这些令人尊敬的吟游诗人仍然可以找到，但仅限于相对未受现代娱乐影响的场所——最引人注目的是偏僻的咖啡馆。

But if music specialists have forgotten about the epic, literary scholars have been forced to consider the importance of music. In fact, the single biggest breakthrough in our scholarly understanding of epic poetry and oral transmission took place during musical entertainments at a coffeehouse. No, I am not exaggerating. In the mid-1930s, Harvard classicist Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord changed our understanding of Homer and the origin of traditional epics by leaving the libraries and archives behind and seeking out the last living performing bards in the actual settings where they made music. Even at this late stage in the shift from oral cultures to literate culture, these venerable singers of tales could still be found, but only in locales relatively untouched by modern entertainment—most notably, out-of-the-way coffee bars.

“寻找歌手的最佳方法是去土耳其咖啡馆，在那里打听，”阿尔伯特·洛德后来解释道。但这并非最初的计划。洛德的老师帕里最初希望在苏联进行田野调查，但他未能获得必要的许可和旅行证件。后来，他决定巴尔干半岛的塞尔维亚-克罗地亚史诗传统或许能提供资料来源，但前提是他能找到仍然能够演奏这些古老歌曲的音乐家。带着一台定制的转录机，该转录机包含两个带拨动开关的唱机——这使得帕里能够连续录制长歌——这两位哈佛学者开始了为期15个月的收集之旅，这彻底改变了我们对史诗和西方文化起源的理解。他们最大的突破是认识了一位后来被他们称为“我们的南斯拉夫荷马”的非凡人物。咖啡馆里的一个土耳其人说他认识很多歌手，但最好的歌手是阿夫多·梅杰多维奇 (Avdo Međedović)，他是一个目不识丁的农民，他一边弹奏着精心制作的歌曲，一边用古斯莱琴为自己伴奏。古斯莱琴是一种单弦乐器，与许多密西西比蓝调音乐家使用的迪德利琴有着惊人的相似之处^。6

“The best method of finding singers was to visit a Turkish coffee house, and make inquiries there,” Albert Lord later explained. That hadn’t been the original plan. Lord’s teacher Parry had first hoped to undertake fieldwork in the Soviet Union, but he couldn’t secure the necessary permissions and travel documents. He then decided that the Serbo-Croatian epic tradition in the Balkans might provide a source, but only if he could find musicians still capable of performing the old songs. Equipped with a custom-made transcription machine that incorporated two turntables with a toggle switch—thus enabling Parry to make continuous recordings of long songs—the Harvard scholars embarked on a fifteen-month collecting expedition that permanently changed our conceptions of the epic and the origins of Western culture. Their biggest breakthrough came with an introduction to the extraordinary person they later dubbed “our Yugoslav Homer.” A Turk in the coffeehouse said he knew many singers, but the best was Avdo Međedović, an illiterate peasant farmer who performed elaborate songs while accompanying himself on the gusle, a one-string instrument with surprising similarities to the diddley bow used by so many Mississippi blues musicians.⁶

正如开篇所述，本书的主要目标之一是揭示如今与文化精英联系在一起的“受人尊敬的”音乐传统实际上是如何来自外来者——奴隶、波西米亚人、叛逆者、农民以及其他社会边缘群体。在这里，我们发现了一个体现这一原则的惊人例子：一位未受过教育的农民不仅向我们尊敬的……揭示了史诗的精髓哈佛学者，并改变了现代学术的进程，但这位农民实际上代表了我们与荷马以及创造了西方文化基础作品的文学大师最接近的现代对应者。

One of the main goals of this book, as noted at the outset, is to show how ‘respectable’ musical traditions now associated with cultural elites actually come from outsiders—slaves, bohemians, rebels, peasants, and others on the margins of society. Here we find a striking example of this principle at work: not only did an untutored peasant reveal the essence of epic poetry to our esteemed Harvard scholars, and change the course of modern scholarship, but this farmer actually represents the closest modern counterpart we have to Homer and the literary masters who created the foundational works of Western culture.

这绝非孤例。几乎就在米尔曼·帕里遇见阿夫多·梅杰多维奇的同时，伟大的美国歌曲收藏家约翰·洛马克斯也遇到了一位令人惊叹的歌手，他后来称之为“黑人荷马”。这位非凡的歌手名叫詹姆斯·“铁头”·贝克，是一位非裔美国人，正在德克萨斯州亨茨维尔监狱服刑九十九年。和梅杰多维奇一样，铁头也已年逾花甲，显然已过巅峰，属于留声机发明前出生的最后一代歌手。细心的文化史学者还会发现其他类似的人物，他们的名字通常出现在现存文献的空白处——例如，牧民贝阿特丽斯·贝尔纳迪，她凭借背诵长篇故事的能力，让著名艺术评论家约翰·拉斯金赞叹不已。又或者，目不识丁的史诗歌手瓦西里·谢戈列诺克，他的故事讲述能力令列夫·托尔斯泰惊叹不已，以至于这位著名小说家甚至在自己的作品中模仿了这位农民的演唱风格。事实上，在我们英语语言历史的开端，我们就遇到了另一位牧民卡德蒙的神秘人物，他的歌声给尊者比德留下了深刻的印象，以至于比德在他八世纪初的教会史中保留了《卡德蒙的赞美诗》。这是现存最古老的英语诗歌作品。

This is hardly an isolated instance. At almost the very same moment that Milman Parry encountered Avdo Međedović, the great American song collector John Lomax met an amazing performer he would later describe as a “black Homer.” This remarkable individual, who went by the name of James “Iron Head” Baker, was an African American serving a ninety-nine-year sentence at Huntsville Penitentiary in Texas. Like Međedović, Iron Head was in his sixties, apparently past his peak years, and a member of that last generation of songsters born before the invention of the phonograph. The careful student of cultural history finds other such individuals, usually mentioned in the margins of surviving documents—for example, the herder Beatrice Bernardi, who dazzled the famous art critic John Ruskin with her ability to sing lengthy tales by memory. Or the illiterate epic singer Vasily Shchegolenok, who amazed Leo Tolstoy with his storytelling, so much so that the famous novelist even emulated aspects of the peasant’s style of delivery in his own writing. In fact, at the very start of the history of our own English language we encounter the mysterious figure of Caedmon, another herder, who so impressed the Venerable Bede with his song that the latter preserved “Caedmon’s Hymn” in his early eighth-century ecclesiastical history. It is the oldest surviving poetic work in English.

我在大学英语专业学习文学时，几乎没有学到任何关于口头传统以及它如何塑造我们文化遗产中里程碑式作品的知识。我们研究过乔叟，却从未了解过表演性叙事对其作品的影响——尽管《坎特伯雷故事集》的框架情节正是围绕着这种传统展开的。最近，学者克里斯托弗·坎农（Christopher Cannon）质疑乔叟是否真的是一位作家，并认为他可能凭记忆背诵了《特洛伊罗斯与克丽西达》的全部八千行诗句。坎农指出，乔叟图书馆收藏的一幅著名肖像画，剑桥大学基督圣体学院经常被描述为“乔叟在读书”，但图中并没有书。他总结道：“这个乔叟不是作家，而是一个朗诵者或背诵者。” 另一个更有说服力的例子是，另一位伟大的英语史诗诗人约翰·弥尔顿是一位表演者/背诵者。我们可以肯定，这位盲人诗人向他的女儿们口述了《失乐园》。据他所说，这些诗句是在夜里来到他面前的，他准备在黎明时分将它们抄写出来与女儿们分享。英语的第三位经典诗人莎士比亚显然也是一位表演者，如果不是在其他地方的话，那就是在舞台上，音乐在他的戏剧中扮演着关键角色——他的作品包括或提到了大约一百首歌曲。莎士比亚显然对将他的表演变成印刷书籍不感兴趣：他的剧本首次以四开本形式出版，几乎可以肯定是在他没有参与的情况下出版的，或许是依靠观众或演员回忆舞台上的台词。如果再加上英国文学第一部伟大的作品——匿名口头史诗《贝奥武甫》，你会得到一个令人惊讶的结果。在《卡德蒙赞美诗》之后的一千年里，定义了英国诗歌伟大的四位作家——乔叟、莎士比亚、弥尔顿和《贝奥武甫》的作者——实际上并不是传统意义上的作家。他们是表演者和朗诵者，更像传统的吟游诗人而不是现代作家，他们都依赖于非凡的记忆技巧^。7

When I studied literature as an English major in college, I was taught almost nothing about the oral tradition and how it shaped landmark works in our cultural heritage. We studied Chaucer, but never learned about the influence of performative storytelling on his work—even though the framing plot of The Canterbury Tales revolves around precisely this kind of tradition. More recently, scholar Christopher Cannon has asked whether Chaucer really was a writer at all, and suggests that he might have recited all eight thousand lines of his Troilus and Criseyde from memory. Cannon notes that a famous portrait of the author owned by the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is often described as “Chaucer reading from a book,” but there is no book shown in the image. “This Chaucer,” he concludes, “is not a writer but a declaimer or reciter.” An even more persuasive case can be made for John Milton, that other great epic poet of the English language, as a performer/reciter. We know with certainty that the blind poet dictated Paradise Lost to his daughters. By his account, the lines came to him during the night, and he was ready to share them for transcription with the coming of dawn. The third canonic poet of the English language, Shakespeare, was also clearly a performer, on the stage if not elsewhere, and music played a key role in his plays—his works include or refer to around one hundred songs. Shakespeare apparently had little interest in turning his performances into printed books: the first publication of his plays, in quarto format, almost certainly occurred without his participation, relying perhaps on audience members or actors drawing on their recollection of lines spoken onstage. Add Beowulf, the anonymous oral epic that is the first great work of English literature, into the mix, and you get a surprising result. The four writers who defined the greatness of English poetry during its first thousand years after “Caedmon’s Hymn”—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the author of Beowulf—were not really writers in any conventional sense. They were performers and reciters, more akin to traditional bards than modern authors, and each relied on extraordinary skills of memorization.⁷

洛德和帕里在实地研究中发现，人们明显不愿依赖书面文本。事实上，他们声称，他们遇到的每一位伟大的童话歌手都是文盲。学者们得出结论，这是一种比失明更普遍的特质，通常与伟大的吟游诗人（甚至传说中的荷马本人）有关。换句话说，视力在歌手的成功中扮演着边缘角色，但阅读能力几乎肯定会阻碍这些音乐家所展现出的惊人记忆力的发展。梅杰多维奇最能体现这种天赋，他用七天时间复述了一首歌，后来写成了一本书。这部名为《斯迈拉吉奇·梅霍的婚礼》的作品长达12311行，大致与荷马的《奥德赛》长度相同。事实上，洛德后来指出，这个故事与著名的希腊史诗中忒勒马科斯的故事有许多相似之处。

Lord and Parry found a marked resistance to relying on written texts in their field research. In fact, they claimed that every one of the great singers of tales they encountered was illiterate. The scholars concluded that this was a more consistent trait than blindness, often associated with great bards (even Homer himself, according to legend). In other words, the ability to see played a marginal role in a singer’s success, but the ability to read would almost certainly hinder the development of the prodigious capacity for memory these musicians demonstrated. In the most striking demonstration of this gift, Međedović recounted a song over the course of seven days that later filled an entire book. This work, The Wedding of Smailagić Meho, goes on for 12,311 lines and is roughly the same length as Homer’s Odyssey. Indeed, Lord later noted that the tale shared many similarities with the story of Telemachus in the famous Greek epic.

帕里和洛德如今解开了古典学界的一大谜团。在他们进行研究的时期，大多数专家认为荷马史诗起源于一个缺乏文字的社会。这一理论提出了一个显而易见的问题：如此复杂的作品是如何保存下来的。梅杰多维奇和他的同行明确指出，对于那些创作歌唱故事的人来说，写作实际上可能是一种障碍。在我们这个数据存储如此普遍、个人记忆能力却被社会相应贬低的时代，这值得我们深思。即使在今天，某些类型的创造力是否也因我们对外部存储的依赖而受到阻碍？

Parry and Lord had now solved one of the great mysteries of classical scholarship. At the time they conducted their research, most experts believed that the Homeric epics had originated in a society that lacked writing. This theory raised the obvious question of how such complex works were preserved. Međedović and his peers made it clear that writing might actually have been a disability to those who invented sung stories. That’s sobering for us to consider in our own age, when data storage is so prevalent and the memory skills of individuals are proportionately devalued by society. Are certain kinds of creativity, even today, hindered by our reliance on external storage?

但如果文字对这些故事的创作者来说并非利器，那么乐器就显得至关重要。哈佛大学的研究人员沮丧地发现，有些歌手除非手里拿着古斯莱琴，否则根本记不住歌词。一位表演者解释说：“只要用古斯莱琴演奏，他就能重复一首只听过一次的歌。” 一旦没有了音乐元素，故事就支离破碎了。向抄写员口述歌词的歌手，往往会记不清一行歌词的音节数，有时会变成散文。“这种情况很有启发性，”洛德总结道，“因为它们表明，即使是在最好的情况下，由最优秀的抄写员完成的口述歌词，从歌词行结构的角度来看，也永远不会与演唱的歌词完全相同……这位歌手在特殊情况下难以适应传统模式。” ⁸

But if writing was no asset to the inventors of these tales, a musical instrument proved essential. The Harvard researchers found, to their dismay, that some singers could not remember the words to their songs unless they had their gusle in their hands. One performer explained that “he could repeat a song that he had heard only once, provided that he heard it to the gusle.” As soon as the musical element was removed, the stories fell apart. Singers who dictated texts to a transcriber got muddled over the number of syllables in a line, sometimes lapsing into prose. “Such cases are instructive,” Lord concluded, “because they indicate that a dictated text, even when done under the best of circumstances and by the best of scribes, is never entirely, from the point of view of the line structure, the same as a sung text.… The singer is struggling with traditional patterns under unusual circumstances.”⁸

然而，读者也应该收到类似的警告：尽管几个世纪以来，传统史诗一直被当作文学文本对待，但它们的真正本质并没有在印刷品上展现出来。它们首先植根于我们的音乐遗产，如果没有节奏和旋律的支持，它们既不会从人类历史中诞生，也不会流传至今。如果你去翻看阿夫多·梅杰多维奇（Avdo Međedović）表演的影片，你会立刻感受到这一点。音乐的魅力令人着迷，无论对表演者还是观众来说，即使在20世纪30年代便携式技术的粗糙画面和低质量录音中，也能让你感​​受到音乐的魅力。

A similar warning should be given, however, to readers: the traditional epics, despite centuries of precedent in treating them as literary texts, do not reveal their true essence on the printed page. They are, first and foremost, embedded in our musical heritage, and would neither have emerged from human history nor lasted until the present day without the support of rhythm and melody. If you track down the films made of Avdo Međedović in performance, you will sense this immediately. The mesmerizing quality of the music, both for the performer and the audience, jumps out at you even in the grainy footage and poorly recorded audio of 1930s portable technology.

二十出头时，我第一次接触这些表演，就被它们与爵士乐的相似之处所震撼。洛德和帕里发现，史诗歌手能够演绎如此复杂的故事，唯一的途径就是依靠即兴创作，以及对各种语言表达方式和模式的运用。某些乐句被反复使用，因为它们的音节长度和韵律使其在各种语境中都能发挥作用。在阅读洛德研究的同时，我也在研究萨克斯演奏家查理·帕克和其他比波普即兴演奏家改编的爵士独奏曲，我在这些音乐表演中看到了同样的情况。帕克运用某些标志性的乐句，并展现出非凡的技巧，能够将它们融入不同的语境。音符和重音可能保持不变，甚至乐句的整体长度——有时只有几个节拍，很少超过一两个小节——也几乎不会改变。但帕克总是能展现出无穷的创造力，将这些旋律构建块运用到不同的和声环境中，或者从不同的节拍开始，或者将它们插入乐句中意想不到的位置。在爵士乐的背景下研究这些策略对我来说是一个启示：我发现，在未经训练的耳朵看来，完全即兴的演奏往往包含大量的重复和巧妙的套路并置。之后，我从洛德和帕里那里了解到，荷马史诗中的重复——例如反复出现的“玫瑰色的黎明”或“迅捷的阿喀琉斯”——源于类似的方法。故事的演唱者，就像爵士乐独奏者一样，为了满足现场表演激情中创造性即兴创作的需求，会运用这些固定的乐句。获得这种洞察力后，我再也无法用同样的方式解读荷马（或其他史诗作家）。

When I first encountered these performances, back in my early twenties, I was struck by the similarities with jazz. Lord and Parry found that the only way epic singers could deliver such complex stories was by relying on improvisation and the manipulation of a wide range of verbal formulas and patterns. Certain phrases were used again and again, because their syllabic length and meter made them useful in a range of contexts. At the same time that I was reading Lord’s research, I was studying transcriptions of jazz solos by saxophonist Charlie Parker and other bebop improvisers, and I saw the exact same thing in these musical performances. Parker relied on certain trademark phrases, and demonstrated an extraordinary mastery in fitting them into different contexts. The notes and accents might stay the same, and even the overall phrase length—sometimes only a couple of beats and rarely more than one or two measures—would almost never change. But Parker would exercise endless ingenuity in using these melodic building blocks in different harmonic contexts, or he would start them on different beats, or insert them at unexpected places in a phrase. Studying such strategies in the context of jazz was a revelation to me: I saw that what might sound, to an untrained ear, like a completely spontaneous improvisation often involved a fair amount of repetition and clever juxtaposition of formulas. And then I learned from Lord and Parry that the repetitions in Homer’s epics—for example, the recurring references to “rosy-fingered dawn” or “swift-footed Achilles”—arose from similar methodologies. The singer of tales, just like a jazz soloist, turns to these set phrases in order to meet the demands of improvising creatively in the heat of live performance. After achieving this insight, I could never read Homer (or other epic writers) in the same way again.

帕里和洛德的最后一个发现值得强调，这与表演者无关，而与观众有关。史诗般的歌曲，学者们了解到，“在当今（20世纪30年代中期），或者直到最近，这些形式一直是村庄和小镇成年男性的主要娱乐方式”。在这里，这些作品的精英地位再次受到质疑，传统史诗开始变得更像我们这个时代的大片、电视节目和电子游戏。在巴尔干半岛的咖啡馆里，我们的学者们亲眼目睹了《伊利亚特》、《贝奥武甫》或《罗兰之歌》等作品，在以音乐叙事的形式呈现时，如何成为大众娱乐。听众很可能是目不识丁的农民——正如我们所见，与表演者并无二致——但这并没有妨碍他们欣赏这些“文学”经典。在这里，我们传统上对高雅音乐和低俗音乐的区分再次误导了我们，使我们无法把握眼前的现实^。9

One last finding from Parry and Lord is worth highlighting, and it has less to do with the performer than the audience. Epic song, the scholars learned, “forms at the present time [the mid-1930s], or until very recently, the chief entertainment of the adult male population in the villages and small towns.” Here again the elite status of these works is called into question, and the traditional epic starts to look more like the blockbuster movies, TV shows, and video games of our own day. In the coffeehouses of the Balkans, our scholars saw firsthand how a work such as the Iliad or Beowulf or the Chanson de Roland, could have served as mass entertainment when presented as a musical narrative. The listeners might very well be illiterate peasants—no different from the performers, as we have seen—but that proved no obstacle to their enjoyment of these ‘literary’ classics. Here again, our conventional distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow music mislead us, keeping us from grasping the reality at hand.⁹

但是如果我们将这些作品称为娱乐，那么在将它们描述为逃避现实之前我们应该三思。如今，这两个词经常联系在一起。在当代社会，娱乐就是逃避现实。但在诞生这些史诗的传统社会中，情况却大不相同。正如我们已经指出的，歌曲是这些社会知识和智慧的宝库。像《伊利亚特》这样的史诗帮助年轻男性为士兵生活做好准备。荷马描述了在那部史诗中201名特洛伊人和54名希腊人的死亡——这涉及使用一系列武器，包括长矛（造成其中100人死亡）、刀剑、箭和石头。如果你现在在电影中看到那种大屠杀，你会认为它被搬上银幕是为了增加刺激。但在古希腊，观众是在了解他们在现实生活中很可能会遇到的情况。你可能需要用长矛、剑，或者——如果没有这些工具——用一块大石头来杀人。即使你不想参与这样的行动，波斯人，甚至可能是你在斯巴达的希腊同胞，也可能会强迫你这么做。

But if we label these works as entertainment, we should hesitate before describing them as escapist. Nowadays those two words often go together. Entertainment is escapism in contemporary society. But matters were far different in the traditional societies that gave birth to these epics. As we have already noted, songs serve as repositories of knowledge and wisdom for these societies. An epic such as the Iliad helped prepare young males for the life of a soldier. Homer describes the deaths of 201 Trojans and 54 Greeks during the course of that epic—and this involves the use of a range of weapons, including spears (responsible for 100 of these fatalities), swords, arrows, and rocks. If you saw that kind of carnage in a movie nowadays, you would assume it was put on the screen to add to the excitement. But in ancient Greece, members of the audience were learning about situations they might very well encounter in real life. You may need to kill someone with a spear, or with a sword, or—lacking such tools—with a big rock. Even if you didn’t want to participate in such doings, the Persians, or perhaps even your fellow Greeks in Sparta, might force your hand.

但即使在古代，这些故事歌曲的娱乐价值也使其容易被用作统治阶级的宣传工具和支持工具。虽然一种新的歌唱方式可能起源于农民、外来者、无论是放荡不羁，还是叛逆不羁，既得权力都会寻求将其力量引导到社会可接受的方向。这一过程在人类历史中根深蒂固——从《诗经》到猫王——即使在缺乏第一手资料和直接证据的情况下，我们也应该去探寻它。

But even in ancient times, the entertainment value of these story songs made them susceptible to potential use as propaganda tools and supports for the ruling class. Although a new way of singing might originate as the expression of a peasant, an outsider, a bohemian, or a rebel, the established powers will seek ways of channeling its force into a socially acceptable direction. This process is so ingrained in human history—from the Shijing to Elvis—that we do well to look for it, even in cases where firsthand accounts and direct evidence are lacking.

这些反复出现的模式使我们能够构建一个关于歌唱史诗本质的合理假设。荷马和其他吟游诗人可能并非出身贵族，而更有可能凭借其非凡的智力获得影响力，就像阿夫多·梅杰多维奇、贝阿特丽斯·贝尔纳迪、卡德蒙或詹姆斯·“铁头”·贝克一样。史诗的完成者究竟是由个人还是群体完成的，尚无定论，但我们从这些现代吟游诗人身上学到的是，天才完全有能力在极少的合作者投入的情况下创作、记忆和演绎史诗作品。最终的歌曲在实际表演中证明了其力量，并吸引了热情的听众，尽管这些最初的听众很可能与故事的歌手一样出身卑微。但统治阶级最终发现了这种具有内在吸引力的叙事的价值，并寻求将这些歌曲转化为自身优势的方法。如今，这部史诗因其在激发爱国主义、鼓舞士兵战斗勇气、增强群体凝聚力以及为各种政治倡议辩护等方面的价值而受到赞誉。在这一阶段，史诗被保存为受人尊敬的文本，而其起源——牧民或农民的创作——则被遗忘。其结果是——我们的学者们对此非常了解，因为这是他们研究的起点——这首诗的细节得以保存，而诗人的传记却几乎空白一片。

These recurring patterns allow us to construct a plausible hypothesis about the nature of the sung epic. Homer and other singing bards were probably not born into nobility, but more likely achieved their influence through their remarkable mental capabilities, much like Avdo Međedović, Beatrice Bernardi, Caedmon, or James “Iron Head” Baker. Whether a single individual or a group was responsible for the finished epic is open to debate, but what we have learned from these modern bards is that a person of genius is perfectly capable of creating, memorizing, and performing epic works with minimal input from collaborators. The resulting song proves its power in actual performance and finds an enthusiastic audience, although these first hearers may well share the same lowly origins as the singer of tales. But the ruling class eventually discovers the value of narratives that have such inherent appeal, and seeks out ways of turning these songs to their own advantage. The epic is now celebrated for its value in stirring up patriotism, inspiring the courage of solders in battle, creating group cohesion, and justifying various political initiatives. At this stage, the epic is preserved as a revered text, and its origins as the creative work of a herder or a peasant are forgotten. The result—and this endpoint our scholars well know, because it is the starting point for their research—is that the poem survives in great detail, while the biography of the poet is virtually a blank page.

关于荷马史诗保存的现有证据倾向于支持这一理论。保存和传播这些文本的热情可以追溯到公元前六世纪的一个关键转折点，据传说，当时雅典暴君庇西特拉图颁布法令，规定在仲夏节期间完整地吟诵荷马史诗。许多人认为这个时代是这些吟诵诗歌被奉为尊崇文本的转折点，而一位寻求……的独裁者……这绝非巧合。合法性和民众支持会使他与荷马及其英雄史诗传统保持一致。另一个公元前六世纪的故事讲述了雅典人和麦加拉人争夺萨拉米斯控制权的故事，双方都引用了《伊利亚特》中的一段话来佐证。无论这些歌唱叙事的起源如何，它们的命运都是成为政治工具。

The available evidence on the preservation of the Homeric epics tends to support this theory. The zeal to preserve and propagate these texts can be traced back to a key turning point in the sixth century BC, when the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, according to legend, issued a decree that the Homeric epics would be recited in their entirety at a midsummer festival. Many see this era as the juncture when these sung poems got enshrined as revered texts, and it can hardly be a coincidence that a dictator seeking legitimacy and popular support would align himself with Homer and the heroic epic tradition. Another story from the sixth century BC tells of the Athenians and Megarians involved in a dispute over control of Salamis, with each side citing a passage from the Iliad for support. Whatever the origins of these sung narratives, their destiny was to serve as political tools.

7

7

歌手的发明

The Invention of the Singer

如今，我们习以为常地认为歌手和歌曲之间存在着某种联系。这是一种因果关系。歌手创作歌曲，而音乐则是创作过程中情感和内心世界的表达。我们如此着迷于这个过程，以至于表演者比音乐本身更受关注。我甚至敢打赌，能从照片中识别出世界著名歌手的人比从录音中识别出的人还多。用现代商业的术语来说，艺术家的形象就像是音乐的一种品牌或具体化的标识。

Today we take for granted the connection between singer and song. It’s a kind of cause-and-effect. The singer creates the song, and the music is an expression of the emotions and inner life that went into its making. We are so fascinated by this process that the performer gets more attention than the music. I’ll even wager that more people can identify world-famous singers from photographs than from recordings. In the parlance of modern commerce, the artist’s image is a kind of brand or embodied logo for the music.

我们很难想象一个相反的世界。然而，在人类历史的大部分时间里，歌曲的力量远大于歌手——表演者和作曲家如此微不足道，以至于他们的名字无法被铭记。歌手的匿名性远不止于掩盖作品的起源。歌曲本身并不表达个人情感。从社会文化的角度来看，我们或许可以说作曲家并不存在。音乐表达了社会的优先事项和诉求，如果我们想找到这些作品的源头，最好抛开我们对个体艺术家的神话，转而关注社会的权力结构。即使在那些据称出自苏美尔女祭司恩赫杜安娜之手、带有明显性暗示的歌曲中，她的内心世界也奇怪地缺席——尽管歌词看似充满私密。我们永远不会忘记，她的行动根植于仪式之中，其驱动力远高于自身的欲望。她扮演着一个角色，而自我表达并非剧本的一部分。

We can hardly imagine a world in which the opposite was true. Yet for most of human history, the song was more powerful than the singer—performers and composers were so unimportant that their names weren’t preserved. This anonymity of the singer went beyond hiding a work’s origins. The songs themselves did not express personal emotions. From a sociocultural standpoint, we might say the composer didn’t exist. The music articulated communal priorities and demands, and if we want to find a source for these works we do well to forget about our mythos of the individual artist and focus instead on the power structures of society. Even in those explicitly sexual songs attributed to the Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna, her inner life is strangely absent from the proceedings—despite the apparent intimacy of the lyrics. We never forget that her actions are embedded in ritual and driven by higher priorities than her own desires. She is playing a role, and self-expression is not part of the script.

音乐实践最终发生了改变，歌曲变成了展现内心生活的平台，几乎可以说是一部音乐自传。歌曲或许真的值得称赞，因为它是心理学的起源，为那些无法接触弗洛伊德、荣格或按小时收费的心理治疗师的社会打开了一扇通往心灵的大门。音乐不仅表达了内心生活，还使其合法化，成为值得表达和思考的东西。在缺乏民主理想和个人权利保障的文明背景下，这种艺术本质转变的重要性不应被低估。歌曲如今不仅可以服务于神灵和统治者，还可以服务于低微的表演者，他们甚至开始在这一过程中获得一种迷人的魅力。

Musical practices eventually changed, and song turned into a platform for the inner life, almost a kind of musical autobiography. Songs might actually deserve credit as the point of origin for psychology, a door into the psyche for societies that didn’t have access to Freud or Jung or pay-by-the-hour therapists. Music not only expressed the inner life, but legitimized it as something worthy of expression and consideration. In the context of civilizations that lacked democratic ideals and protections of individual rights, the importance of this shift in the nature of art should not be minimized. Song could now serve not only the deities and rulers, but also the lowly performer, who even begins to achieve a kind of glamorous allure in the process.

希腊莱斯博斯岛诗人萨福常被誉为抒情诗的发明者，抒情诗是抒情音乐的主要载体，而歌曲形式正是这种情感表达的主要渠道——尽管她现存文本的仪式性特征与忏悔性同样明显。然而，我们需要追溯到更早的时候，才能找到那个神奇的时刻，那时歌手们第一次以个体的身份站出来，突破制度和社会框架，开始用歌声表达自己的灵魂。在萨福之前的五百多年里，我们在现存的埃及新王国时期的歌曲中发现了这种更具个人色彩的萌芽，这些歌曲可以追溯到公元前十三世纪。如果我们想要追溯现代创作歌手这一概念的历史，即将私人情感转化为音乐的创造精神，那么萨福就是我们的起点，也是我们今天在歌曲中珍视的许多元素的发源地。

Sappho, the Greek poet of Lesbos, is often given credit for inventing the lyric, the song form that serves as the main conduit for this music of emotional expression—although even here the ritualistic quality of her surviving texts is as pronounced as the confessional aspects. We need to dig back even earlier, however, to find that magical moment when singers first stood out as individuals against the institutional and social framework and began to express their souls in song. More than five hundred years before Sappho, we discover the first stirrings of this more personal approach in the surviving songs of the Egyptian New Kingdom, which date back to the thirteenth century BC. If we want to trace the history of the modern concept of the singer-songwriter, the creative spirit who turns private emotions into music, this is our proper starting point, the birthplace for much of what we cherish in songs today.

这种环境不太可能让歌手以个人身份出现。埃及文化视艺术家为匿名的、可互换的人物。我们甚至不知道任何一位古埃及作家的名字。能够确定地与文学作品联系起来的人，绝无仅有。没有哪位画家与哪幅画作联系在一起，也很少有雕塑家的名字被人知晓。即使提到了一位圣贤，例如受人尊敬的博学者伊姆霍特普，也没有任何一部著作留存下来，记录这位所谓天才的个人表达。歌曲也从未与演唱者或作曲家联系在一起。

This is an unlikely setting for the singer to emerge as an individual. Egyptian culture saw artists as anonymous, interchangeable figures. We don’t know the name of a single ancient Egyptian writer who can be linked with certainty to a body of literary work. No painter is identified with a painting, and few sculptors are known by name. Even when a sage is mentioned, such as the esteemed polymath Imhotep, no book of writings survives to document the personal expressions of the supposed genius. And songs are never connected by name with their performers or composers.

然而，在第一首情歌出现的同时，埃及人对音乐的态度发生了显著变化。现存的艺术作品表明，埃及音乐家在从寺庙仪式到军事行动等多种场合进行表演，但现在最常见的场景是宴会。我们在这里可以找到弦乐器和管乐器、打击乐器和歌手，以及拍手和跳舞的人们。在新王国时期（从公元前十六世纪到公元前十一世纪），这些场景中明显的感官享受变得更加突出。我们看到了鲜花、珠宝和其他奢华的证据。例如，底比斯 Kynebu 墓中的一幅图像显示，女性表演者穿着轻薄透明的礼服，其中两人正在跳着挑逗性的舞蹈。这显然不是仪式化的葬礼宴会，而是一个肉欲和自我放纵的节日场合。

Yet a marked change can be detected in Egyptian attitudes toward music around the same time the first love lyrics appear. Surviving art shows Egyptian musicians performing in many contexts, ranging from temple rituals to military endeavors, but the most frequently depicted setting is now the banquet. Here we find string and wind instruments, percussion and singers, as well as people clapping and dancing. During the course of the New Kingdom, which extended from the sixteenth to the eleventh centuries BC, a markedly sensual quality becomes more prominent in these scenes. We see flowers, jewelry, and other evidences of luxury. An image from the tomb of Kynebu in Thebes, for example, shows female performers wearing flimsy, transparent gowns, and two of them are engaged in a provocative dance. This is obviously no ritualized funeral banquet, but a festive occasion for carnality and self-indulgence.

这种情色在都灵纸莎草纸中发现的音乐家图像中显得尤为突出，这些图像可以追溯到大约公元前1150年。有些人甚至将这些文物称为古代色情作品，或者用一位专家的话来说，是“世界上第一本男性杂志”。这组令人震惊的图像展示了魅力女性试图同时演奏乐器和进行性行为。这些男性秃顶且超重，几乎无法被列为众神之列，因此很明显，我们所见证的与生育崇拜中仪式化的性行为截然不同。事实上，很难将这一场景描述为一场全面的狂欢^。1

This kind of eroticism takes on even more prominence in images of musicians found in the Turin Papyrus, which dates from approximately 1150 BC. Some have even labeled this artifact as ancient pornography, or, in the words of one pundit, the “world’s first men’s mag.” This striking collection of images shows attractive women trying to play musical instruments and perform sex acts at the same time. The men are balding and overweight, hardly candidates for the pantheon of gods, so it’s clear we are witnessing something very different from the ritualized sexuality of the fertility cults. Indeed, it’s hard to describe the scene as depicting anything less than a full-scale orgy.¹

这份丑闻缠身的莎草纸竟然在代尔麦地那被发现，而正是在那里，我们才得以发现那些最非凡的古代情歌，这难道仅仅是巧合吗？我不这么认为。这些是相同的歌词学者彼得·德朗克 (Peter Dronke) 在试图证明世界不同音乐传统体现了人类的普遍属性时，将此作为证据。

Is it mere coincidence that this scandalous papyrus was found in Deir el-Medina, the same locale that gave us the most extraordinary love songs of antiquity? I don’t think so. These are the same lyrics scholar Peter Dronke called in as evidence when seeking to prove that the different musical traditions of the world testified to universal human attributes.

她的名字让我振奋……

Her name is that which lifts me up.…

当我见到她时，我已康复，

When I see her I am well again,

当她睁开眼睛时，我的身体又年轻了，

When she opens her eyes, my body is young again,

当她说话时，我又变得坚强，

When she speaks, I grow strong again,

当我拥抱她时，她就驱散了我身上的邪恶^。2

When I embrace her, she banishes evil from me.²

这首歌以及其他类似的歌曲并非出自新王国时期的法老或贵族，而是出自那些在尼罗河西岸底比斯对面的帝王谷建造陵墓的过程中发挥了关键作用的工匠之手。这些非凡文献首次被发现时，有人将其描述为古埃及平民和贫困下层阶级的歌曲。但这并非对代尔麦地那居民的准确描述，这些工人与家人就住在那里。按照当时的标准，他们的收入丰厚。他们享受闲暇时光，拥有牲畜和其他贵重财产。他们的受教育程度也比普通埃及人高。代尔麦地那的居民中很大一部分人，甚至可能是大多数人，都能读写。相比之下，普通民众的识字率却很低——可能不到10%。如果你的工作涉及在墓壁上刻写象形文字，或保存行政记录，或遵循复杂建筑项目的计划，那么读写能力就是一项宝贵的资产，而且往往是必需的。不，他们并非穷人，但也不是统治者和精英。在这里，我们在人类历史上第一次清晰地感受到歌曲如何能够表达那些不处于权力结构顶层的个体的内心世界。

This song, and others like it, did not come from the pharaohs or nobles of the New Kingdom, but instead from the artisans who played a key role in the construction of their tombs in the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank of the Nile opposite Thebes. When these extraordinary documents first came to light, some described them as songs of the common people and the poor lower classes of ancient Egypt. But that’s hardly an accurate description of the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina, where these workers lived with their families. By the standards of the day, they were well paid. They enjoyed leisure time, and owned cattle and other valuable property. They were also more highly educated than the typical Egyptian. A large percentage of the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina could read and write, perhaps even a majority of them. By contrast, literacy among the wider population was rare—probably less than 10 percent. If your work involved inscribing hieroglyphs on a tomb wall, or keeping administrative records, or following plans on a complex construction project, literacy was a great asset, and often a necessity. No, these weren’t the poor, but neither were they rulers and elites. Here, for the first time in human history, we get a clear sense of how songs could express the inner lives of individuals who weren’t at the top of the institutional power structure.

如果你正在撰写一部关于个人自主和人权的历史，那么这个小村庄绝对值得你关注。拉美西斯三世统治时期，一场因减少分配给工人的粮食而引发的劳资纠纷，可能是人类历史上有记录的第一次罢工。不满的工人们甚至发起了……我们现在称之为在寺庙遗址“静坐”的抗议，最终“管理层”满足了他们的要求。同样，这绝非巧合——我们在这里，如同在其他地方一样，看到个人表达音乐的创新与人权的扩展息息相关。这个村庄也为我们留下了许多最著名的古埃及文学作品，包括讽刺作品和叙事小说。这些环境的结合，为我们提供了宝贵的洞见，让我们得以了解哪些类型的社会能够促进创造性表达。

If you were writing a history of personal autonomy and human rights, this small village would demand your attention. A labor dispute during the reign of Ramesses III, ignited by a reduction in grain distributions to the workers, may have been the first recorded strike in human history. The disgruntled workers even staged what we would now call a ‘sit-in’ at a temple site, and ‘management’ eventually met their demands. Again, this can hardly be a coincidence—we see here, as elsewhere, that innovations in the music of personal expression are linked to an expansion in human rights. This same village also gave us many of the best-known literary works of ancient Egypt, including satire and narrative fiction. This conjunction of circumstances offers invaluable insights into the kinds of societies that foster creative expression.

或许我们需要重新审视我们对政治歌曲的定义。大多数人听到这个词，脑海中浮现的画面是学生抗议活动中的反战口号，或是反抗的工人高唱《国际歌》。大多数乐迷都知道这些抗议歌曲的存在，但却不太关注它们，认为它们只是我们文化声音景观中极小的一部分。认为传统情歌可以充当激进的政治宣言，这种想法很奇怪，甚至有些自相矛盾。传统观念认为，抒情地表达亲密情感与政治歌曲截然相反。然而，音乐史却讲述了一个截然不同的故事。无论是在古埃及还是在我们这个时代，没有什么比一种新型情歌中蕴含的个人主义和自我导向行为的迹象更能威胁权力掮客了。

Perhaps we need to reevaluate how we define a political song. When most people hear that term, they conjure up images of antiwar chants at student protests, or defiant workers singing “The Internationale.” Most music fans know that these protest songs exist, but don’t pay much attention to them, assuming they represent only the tiniest portion of our cultural soundscapes. The idea that traditional love songs might serve as radical political statements is a strange one, almost a paradoxical one. The lyrical expression of intimate emotion is the exact opposite of the political song, according to conventional wisdom. Yet the history of music tells a very different story. Few things are more threatening to power brokers than the signs of individualism and self-directed behavior embedded in a new kind of love song, whether in ancient Egypt or during our own lifetimes.

问问1969年参加石墙起义的抗议者就知道了。石墙听起来像是战场上的防御工事，又像是内战时期将军的名字，甚至用在舞厅里也显得格格不入——这次事件中，石墙是曼哈顿克里斯托弗街上的一家夜总会，允许同性恋伴侣在警察不断骚扰的情况下跳舞。但当夜总会的顾客及其盟友决定与警察对抗，并在一系列反抗甚至有时是暴力的回应迫使当局让步时，这些战斗的意味就得到了充分体现。历史学家大卫·卡特认为，这六天的抗议和抵抗如今被认为是“同性恋政治运动转型的推动力”。此后，同性恋权利组织在纽约和其他城市涌现，动员人们提供支持和政治干预。如今，在石墙起义遗址上竖立了一座纪念碑。石墙暴动，那些经历过动乱的人都亲身体验过浪漫主义音乐对统治精英的威胁有多大^。3

Just ask the protesters who took part in the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Stonewall sounds like the name of a battlefield fortification or a Civil War general, and might even seem out of place as the identity of a dance hall—in this case, a nightclub on Christopher Street in Manhattan that allowed gay couples to dance in the face of constant harassment from cops. But those overtones of combat were fulfilled when club patrons and their allies decided to confront the police, and after a series of defiant and sometimes violent responses forced authorities to back down. These six days of protests and resistance are today recognized as “the motivating force in the transformation of the gay political movement,” according to historian David Carter. In the aftermath, gay rights organizations sprang up in New York and other cities, mobilizing support and political intervention. There’s now a monument at the site of the Stonewall riots, and those who lived through the turmoil know from firsthand experience how threatening romantic music can be to the ruling elite.³

然而，五年前英国入侵时也发生过同样的事情——我们发现一个战争隐喻被刻意用来描述一种新型情歌进入美国生活。1964年2月9日，披头士乐队在《埃德·沙利文秀》上为七千三百万电视观众表演，他们演唱的每一首歌都是情歌，然而这种对浪漫的持续关注反而让父母和其他权威人士更加担忧。同样的事情也发生在20世纪50年代的猫王、40年代的辛纳屈、30年代的摇摆乐、20年代的爵士乐和布鲁斯等等，一直到游吟诗人，甚至更远的萨福，或者埃及第十八王朝。他们都在唱情歌，但他们也以自己的方式唱着抗议歌曲，因为他们的目标是改变社会及其规范。在音乐方面，个人即政治，一直以来都是如此。

Yet the same thing had happened five years earlier with the British Invasion—here we find a war metaphor deliberately used to describe the introduction of a new kind of love song into American life. When the Beatles performed for seventy-three million television viewers on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, every number they performed was a love song, yet that persistent focus on romance only alarmed parents and other authority figures all the more. And the same thing happened with Elvis in the 1950s, Sinatra in the 1940s, swing in the 1930s, jazz and blues in the 1920s, and on and on, all the way to the troubadours, or even further to Sappho, or the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt. They were all just singing love songs, but they were also, in their own way, protest songs, because they aimed to change society and its norms. When dealing with music, the personal is the political, and always has been.

代尔麦地那还为我们提供了其他线索，揭示音乐创新是如何发生的。我曾在其他地方论述过，新的艺术方法像疾病一样传播——事实上，用“病毒式传播”一词来描述这一过程再贴切不过了。即使在今天，企业用来预测新产品或新技术传播的数学公式也源自医学领域。整个分析领域都源于对瘟疫和传染病进程的预测。艺术也不例外，有助于传播疾病的条件也引发了艺术革命。在这两种情况下，最重要的因果因素是来自原本分离的人群的密切融合。这就是为什么港口城市和文化大熔炉——纽约、新奥尔良、利物浦、威尼斯、哈瓦那等等——对音乐史产生如此巨大影响的原因，也是为什么地球上一些最不健康的地方会改变文化史的进程的原因。古希腊悲剧的巅峰与公元前430年的雅典大瘟疫相吻合。 1348 年，黑死病夺走了佛罗伦萨大部分人口的生命，但文艺复兴的诞生许多学者认为，莎士比亚的艺术成就诞生于1350年的同一座城市。莎士比亚的艺术成就诞生于英国反复爆发的致命瘟疫之中。新奥尔良诞生爵士乐的时期，也是美国健康状况最差的大城市，非裔美国人的平均寿命仅为36岁。这些因素使这些社区以当时的标准呈现出国际化和开放的风貌，而从艺术和流行病学的角度来看，它们也成为了病毒式传播的源头^。4

Deir el-Medina offers us still other clues to how musical innovations take place. I have argued elsewhere that new approaches to art spread like diseases—indeed, the use of the term viral to describe this process could hardly be more apt. Even today, the mathematical formulas applied by businesses to forecast the dissemination of a new product or technology are drawn from the medical field. This entire field of analysis originated in the attempt to predict the course of plagues and contagions. The arts are no different, and the same conditions that help spread a disease also lead to artistic revolutions. The most significant causal factor, in both instances, is the close intermingling of people who come from previously separated population groups. This is why port cities and melting pots—New York, New Orleans, Liverpool, Venice, Havana, and others—exert so much influence on music history, and why some of the unhealthiest places on earth change the course of cultural history. The high point of ancient Greek tragedy coincides with the Great Athenian Plague of 430 BC. The Black Death killed much of Florence’s population in 1348, but the birth of the Renaissance is dated, by many scholars, to that same city in 1350. Shakespeare’s artistic achievements took place amidst recurring deadly plagues in England. New Orleans gave birth to jazz at a time when it was also the most unhealthy major city in the United States, with an average lifespan for an African American resident a mere thirty-six years. The very factors that made these communities cosmopolitan and open-minded, by the standards of their day, turned them into sources of virality from both an artistic and epidemiological standpoint.⁴

代尔麦地那（Deir el-Medina）的情况想必也是如此。尽管它是一个小社区，但在考古学家出土的材料中发现了三十多个不同的外国名字——在当时的背景下，这可谓异乎寻常的多样性。技艺精湛的工匠必定从很远的地方来到这里生活。这里曾是古埃及的大熔炉，而那里的发现证明了多元文化主义与艺术创新之间的联系。当如此众多的人们将相互冲突的习俗和态度带到一个新的地方时，就会产生一种创造性的潮流，挑战旧有的生活方式，并创造新的生活方式。然而，我们也在这里看到了这些富有创造力的社区所特有的相关公共卫生问题的迹象。斯坦福大学考古学家安妮·奥斯汀甚至认为，公共卫生政策的诞生就起源于这个埃及村庄。随着传染病和其他医疗问题在居民中蔓延，监督者们通过实施“国家补贴”的政策和项目来应对。在接下来的篇幅中，我们将在许多关键时刻看到音乐创新、多样性和疾病之间的这种联系^。5

The same must have been true at Deir el-Medina. Although it was a small community, more than thirty different foreign names have been found in the materials unearthed by archaeologists—an extraordinary diversity in the context of the time. Skilled artisans must have come from great distances to live there. This was the melting pot of ancient Egypt, and the findings there testify to the connection between multiculturalism and artistic innovation. When so many diverse people bring conflicting practices and attitudes to a new locale, a creative flux results that challenges old-fashioned ways and creates new ones. Yet here, too, we see signs of the associated public health issues that are characteristic of these same creative communities. Stanford archaeologist Anne Austin has even suggested that the birth of public health policy originated in this same Egyptian village. As infection and other medical problems spread among the inhabitants, overseers responded by implementing ‘state-subsidized’ policies and programs. We will see this connection between musical innovation, diversity, and disease at many junctures in the pages ahead.⁵

这种新型歌曲的出现是音乐史上的一个里程碑，然而，我们却只能猜测它是如何从埃及传播开来的——又或许，爱情抒情诗并非传播开来，而是在不同的地方独立兴起，受到某种近乎普遍的自我表达和个人自主的驱动力的推动。这种抒情诗是否可能从埃及传到了希腊，并在古代最著名的亲密歌曲歌手萨福的影响下蓬勃发展？这两个地方相隔数百年和数千公里。然而，我注意到，即使在今天，莱斯博斯岛是萨福的故乡，也是中东难民在欧洲寻找新家园的最常见入境点。2016年叙利亚危机最严重的时候，几乎每天都有新难民抵达莱斯博斯岛，乘坐小船、木筏和充气艇，踏上他们艰辛的旅程。即使在我撰写本文时，仍有成千上万的难民居住在这座岛上。莱斯博斯岛无疑早在古代就曾是不同文化的交汇点。通过观察世界其他地方的类似情况，我们可以颇有把握地说，歌曲是最有可能在漫长的旅程中留存下来的财产，即使其他一切都被带走，它依然属于新来者。我们无法证明这首充满爱意的告白之歌是通过这种传播途径传入西方世界的，但这无疑是一个令人信服的假设。

The appearance of this new kind of song is a milestone moment in the history of music, yet we can merely guess at how it was disseminated from Egypt—or perhaps the love lyric wasn’t disseminated, but sprang up independently in different places, spurred on by some quasi-universal drive toward self-expression and personal autonomy. Could the lyric have traveled from Egypt to Greece, where it later flourished under the influence of the most famous ancient singer of intimate songs, Sappho? Hundreds of years and kilometers separate the two settings. Yet I note that even today the island of Lesbos, home to Sappho, is the most frequent entry point for refugees from the Middle East seeking a new home in Europe. At the height of the Syrian crisis in 2016, new arrivals would show up on Lesbos almost every day, making their treacherous journey on small boats, rafts, and inflatable crafts. Even as I write, thousands of refugees still reside on this island. Certainly Lesbos must have served as a meeting point between cultures even in ancient times. We can state with some confidence, from observing comparable situations in other parts of the world, that songs are the possessions most likely to survive long journeys, remaining the property of the newcomer even when everything else has been taken away. We can’t prove that the confessional song of love arrived in the Western world by this path of transmission, but it stands out as a persuasive hypothesis.

我们更有理由相信，埃及的情歌影响了雅歌。雅歌是一部奇特而有力的犹太-基督教经典，以诗歌的形式将宗教信仰与情色融合，这在圣经中是独一无二的。长期以来，评论家们一直在努力将这种明显的情欲与我们对圣经的期望相协调，并诉诸复杂的象征性解读——将雅歌中对性亲密的邀请视为上帝与以色列人民之间关系的象征，或基督与他的新娘——教会之间的关系。许多神秘主义者被这段文字所吸引，在其诗意的段落中找到了与神性激情结合的呼唤。马丁·路德对这段文字进行了政治解读——将其解读为所罗门对上帝确认其王权的感谢和赞美之词。近年来，女权主义神学家们被《圣经》中这部分似乎表达了女性情感的内容所吸引，将其作为化解《旧约》中父权制精神的平台。

We have even better reason to believe that the love lyrics of Egypt influenced the Song of Songs, that strange and powerful work of Judeo-Christian scripture that mixes religious belief and eroticism in a poetic text unlike anything else in the Bible. Commentators have long struggled to reconcile this overt sensuality with the expectations we bring to holy scripture, and have resorted to elaborate symbolic interpretations—viewing the invitations to sexual intimacy in the Song of Songs as references to the relationship between God and the people of Israel, or between Christ and his bride, the Church. Many mystics have been drawn to this text, finding in its poetic passages a call to passionate union with the divine. Martin Luther constructed a political interpretation of the text—reading it as Solomon’s words of thanks and praise for God’s confirmation of his kingship. More recently, feminist theologians have been drawn to this section of the Bible, which seems to express a woman’s sentiments, embracing it as a platform for defusing the patriarchal ethos of the Old Testament.

然而，那些熟悉古代美索不达米亚神圣婚礼仪式以及代尔麦地那出土情歌的人，不禁会将《雅歌》视为这些早期传统的延伸。文本中看似矛盾的矛盾，仅仅反映了不同音乐范式之间的冲突。作品与古代音乐中反复出现的问题相同，即歌曲应该服务于宗教领域、政治领域还是个人领域，这三个领域都悬而未决。这三个领域都在争夺对经文的控制权。因此，我们有三种相应的方式去定义诗歌的叙事声音：它可以被解读为国王之歌，先知之歌，或情人的歌。在现代人看来，这是三种不同的立场，但在神圣的婚礼仪式中，它们却并存。

Yet those familiar with the sacred marriage ritual of ancient Mesopotamia and the love songs unearthed in Deir el-Medina cannot help but see the Song of Songs as an extension of these earlier traditions. The apparent paradoxes in the text merely reflect the clash of different musical paradigms. The prevailing tension in the work is the same one that recurs again and again in ancient music, namely, the unresolved question of whether song should serve the religious sphere, the political sphere, or the personal sphere. All three vie for control of the scriptural text. As a result, we have three corresponding ways of defining the narrative voice of the poem: it can be interpreted as the song of a king, or a prophet, or a lover. To the modern mind, those are three different stances, but in the sacred marriage ritual they coexisted.

所罗门，传统上是《雅歌》的作者，可以用这三种方式来描述。但即使他能够同时扮演这些角色，也有很多未解之谜。作品几乎一开始就出现了一个女声：“愿他用口与我亲嘴，因你的爱情比酒更美……王带我进他的内室……耶路撒冷的众女子啊，我身黑，却是秀美。” 如果我们从字面上理解这段文字，这并非所罗门的声音，而是他那位黑人情人的声音。毋庸置疑，这里对表面含义的解读是坚决的。

Solomon, by tradition the author of the Song of Songs, can be described in all three ways. But even his ability to take on each of these roles leaves much unexplained. A female voice also emerges almost at the very beginning of the work: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.… The king hath brought me into his chambers.… I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.” If we take the text at face value, this is not the voice of Solomon, but of his black lover. Needless to say, there is firm resistance to the surface meanings here.

拉比兼学者迈克尔·V·福克斯认为，“埃及情诗在巴勒斯坦被吟唱”。因此，这部神圣的文本应该被视为“古老而绵延的文学传统的晚期分支”。但这种明显世俗且感性的抒情诗似乎与上下文格格不入。它们是如何出现在圣经中的呢？古代以色列人无法区分情歌和宗教歌曲的说法简直令人难以置信。那些认为雅歌被收录到圣经中是某种错误的人也持同样的观点。事实上，一份现存的记载讲述了拉比·阿奇巴在近两千年前抱怨人们在酒馆里吟唱这部神圣的文本以求娱乐。宗教权威们很清楚雅歌可能被滥用；尽管如此，他们一定觉得他们需要这首歌。为什么呢？首先，我们不需要接受那些基于对一段相当直白的文本的重大误解而产生的难以置信的理论。我们可以通过查看音乐史上的其他例子来找到更合理的解释——例如，圣弗朗西斯在他的宗教颂歌中借鉴了吟游诗人的技巧，或者当梵蒂冈试图接管歌剧并将其丑闻音乐被用在教皇的祭祀中，就像17世纪30年代在罗马发生的那样，或者像埃尔维斯·普雷斯利受理查德·尼克松邀请访问白宫那样。这种互动很容易理解：权力掮客们想利用罪恶、肉欲的音乐的诱惑，于是他们尝试了一种奇怪的平衡行为：借用它，并试图将其用于服务于现行制度。结果往往令人尴尬——如果你对此表示怀疑，可以看看罗纳德·里根与迈克尔·杰克逊会面的照片——但双方都能从这种交易中获益。所罗门王也不例外。即使是古代的先知也知道，如果他们将神圣的信息与流行的歌词融合在一起，就能强化这些信息。从这个角度来看，解读雅歌的难度就消失了^。6

Rabbi and scholar Michael V. Fox believes that “Egyptian love poetry was sung in Palestine.” The sacred text thus must be seen as “a late offshoot of an ancient and continuous literary tradition.” But such obviously secular—and sensual—lyrics seem mismatched with the context. How did they end up in the Bible? The idea that ancient Israelites couldn’t tell the difference between love songs and religious songs simply defies belief. The same is true of those who think the inclusion of the Song of Songs in scripture was some sort of mistake. In fact, a surviving account tells of Rabbi Aqiba complaining, almost two thousand years ago, about people singing this sacred text in taverns for entertainment. Religious authorities were well aware of the potential misuse of the Song of Songs; nonetheless, they must have felt they needed this particular song. Why? First of all, we don’t need to embrace implausible theories based on grand misunderstandings of a fairly straightforward text. We can find a far more likely explanation by looking at other examples from music history—when, for example, St. Francis borrowed from the techniques of the troubadours for his religious canticle, or when the Vatican tried to take over the opera and turn its scandalous music into the service of the pope, as happened in Rome during the 1630s, or when Elvis Presley was invited to the White House by Richard Nixon. The dynamic is easy to understand: power brokers want to take advantage of the allure of sinful, sensual music, so they attempt an odd balancing act: borrowing it and trying to put it to the service of the prevailing institutions. The result is often awkward—go look at a photo of Ronald Reagan’s meeting with Michael Jackson, if you doubt it—but both parties gain from the transaction. King Solomon was no different. Even ancient prophets knew they could strengthen their divinely inspired messages if they mixed them up with popular lyrics. The apparent difficulty of deciphering the Song of Songs disappears when approached from this perspective.⁶

我们也知道这个故事的结局。当局试图控制这些充满激情的歌曲，但音乐却抵制这种强加的体面和对统治机构的屈从。从长远来看，歌曲反抗统治阶级，并为个人自由和自主创造了更大的空间。评论家们或许会假装《诗经》中“国风”歌曲中表达性欲的女性实际上是在宣扬儒家的治国之道，但现存的文本更多地是在歌颂私人生活，而非弘扬公共美德。萨福的私密表达被品达对贤能之士的赞美所取代，但如今，即使以碎片化的形式，萨福也比那些追求官场恩惠的后继者更深刻地向我们诉说。事实上，你甚至不需要阅读任何这些文本就能弄清楚哪种范式最终占据了主导地位：只需打开收音机或观看最新的热门音乐视频即可。表达个人情感的歌曲随处可见，而表达官方教条的赞美诗却无处可寻，除非在少数独裁政权下，人们被迫唱官方认可的当权歌词。在朝鲜，你可以听到名为《我们要把刺刀握得更紧》、《机械化歌声中洋溢着丰收的喜悦》、《土豆骄傲》和《我也养鸡》的流行歌曲。但在这些专制体制下，表达个人自主的歌曲尽管遭到当局的敌视，但这种自我主张无疑在隐秘中蓬勃发展。甚至朝鲜的宣传人员也试图借鉴边境对岸的韩国流行音乐元素，渴望其大众市场的吸引力。古代统治者应该能识别这种策略，因为他们自己也曾实践过。

We also know how this story ends. The authorities try to control these passionate songs, but music resists this kind of imposed respectability and subservience to ruling institutions. Over the long run, songs defy the ruling class and create an expanded space for individual freedom and personal autonomy. Commentators may try to pretend that the women expressing their sexual desire in the songs of the “Airs of the States” from the Shijing were actually offering Confucian precepts on government, but the surviving texts do more to celebrate private life than to promote public virtue. Sappho’s intimate expressions were supplanted by Pindar’s praise of worthy men, but nowadays, Sappho speaks to us more profoundly, even in fragmented form, than those successors of hers who courted official favor. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to read any of these texts to figure out which paradigm prevailed in the long run: instead, just turn on the radio or watch the latest hit music videos. Songs of personal expression are everywhere, while hymns expressing official dogmas are nowhere to be found, except in those rare dictatorships that force people to sing the officially sanctioned lyrics of the powers-that-be. In North Korea, you can hear pop songs entitled “We Shall Hold Bayonets More Firmly,” “The Joy of Bumper Harvest Overflows Amidst the Song of Mechanization,” “Potato Pride,” and “I Also Raise Chickens.” But inside these authoritarian settings, songs of personal autonomy and self-assertion no doubt flourish in hiding, despite the hostility of authorities. And even North Korean propagandists try to borrow from elements of K-pop from across the border, craving its mass-market appeal. Ancient rulers would have recognized this gambit, because they practiced it themselves.

在研究音乐史的不同时期时，我们应该牢记后一个例子。与我们现在的时代相比，过去的时代更像朝鲜，而不像一个高度个人主义的资本主义经济体。在很多情况下，留存下来的歌曲并非在当时最具意义的歌曲，而在少数得以保存下来的大众音乐中，它很可能需要经过制度力量的净化和吸收，才能获得足够的尊重，被记录在纸莎草纸或羊皮纸上，或刻在石头或楔形文字板上。这个过程在我们今天仍在继续：想想一首说唱歌曲在出现在电视网络之前所经历的“净化”过程——那些几乎定义了嘻哈精神的刺耳、扰乱人心的歌词，最先被审查人员屏蔽，或被表演者自己自愿删除，因为他们知道在大众媒体上不能太过尖锐。如果这种筛选和粉饰在我们这个宽容的时代，在承诺给予音乐家充分言论自由保护的社会中依然存在，想象一下，在过去的专制统治下，这种情况会多么常见。所以，如果一位女子的情歌被一位国王变成了经文，也不要感到惊讶。音乐史就是这样展开的，尤其对于任何创新或超越的音乐而言。

We ought to keep this latter example in mind as we study the different epochs of music history. The past was, in comparison with our own times, more like North Korea, and less like a hyper-individualist capitalist economy. In many instances, the songs that have survived aren’t the ones that had the most significance in their time, and on those rare occasions when the music of the masses was preserved, it probably had to be purified and co-opted by institutional forces before gaining sufficient respectability to get set down on papyrus or parchment, or embedded in stone or on cuneiform tablets. This process continues in our day: consider the process of ‘purification’ a rap song undergoes before showing up on network television—the jarring, disruptive words that almost define the ethos of hip-hop are the first ones to get bleeped out by censors, or voluntarily removed by the performers themselves, who know they can’t be too edgy on mass media. If this kind of winnowing and window-dressing goes on in our tolerant times, in societies that promise musicians the full protections of freedom of expression, imagine how much more often they happened under the authoritarian rulers of the past. So don’t be surprised if a woman’s erotic love song gets turned into a scriptural utterance by a king. That’s how the history of music unfolds, especially for anything innovative or transgressive.

8

8

音乐的耻辱

The Shame of Music

毕达哥拉斯革命之后，西方音乐的断裂显露无疑。或许神圣与世俗，或者换句话说，局内人与局外人之间的分界线一直存在。但我并不完全认同这一点。历史学家应该时刻警惕，不要在他们的学科中寻找一个伊甸园，一个遥远的、没有我们如今所知的社会结构对立、生活整体化的时代。即便如此，我仍然坚信，在那些遥远的狩猎、放牧和原始农业时代，我们的祖先只知道大家共同分享的歌曲。音乐拥有力量——它是他们的技术，驱动着宇宙万物——但它也是一种公共资源。每个人都依赖它来造福所有人，无论是集体还是个人。然而，如果那个伊甸园时代真的存在过，那么它在公元前500年就消失了，那时正是被称为希腊黄金时代的黎明。

After the Pythagorean revolution, the rupture in Western music comes out into the open. Perhaps it was always there, that divide between the sacred and the vulgar, or, put differently, the insider and the outsider. But I’m not entirely convinced of that. Historians should always beware of seeking a Garden of Eden in their discipline, a distant era of holistic life without the antagonisms of social structures as we now know them. Even so, I still hold onto the possibility that our forebears, in those distant days of hunting and herding and primitive agriculture, knew only songs that everyone shared. Music possessed power—it was their technology and made things happen in the universe—but it was a communal resource. Everyone relied on it for the good of all, collectively and individually. Yet if that Edenic era ever existed, it had disappeared by 500 BC, the dawn of the era known as the Golden Age of Greece.

如今，我们日益感受到国家、社区乃至家庭音乐生活中的分化。政治认可的音乐，精英阶层认可的音乐，被推崇、教授、传播。但这并不能掩盖一个截然不同的音乐领域的存在，它远远不那么庄重——尽管关于它的细节鲜有留存下来供后世传颂。我们知道它曾经存在，只是因为人们对它进行了猛烈的攻击。可惜的是，统治者几乎没有记录这些被蔑视的表演供我们查阅。这正是我们对音乐史的描述如此片面的最大原因，它强调歌曲的体面，却淡化其颠覆性。在古希腊音乐的背景下，这表现为对调音系统的深深执着——这个主题比古代音乐生态系统的任何其他方面都更受学者们的关注，而对于这些系统旨在排除的不和谐音和危险声音，学者们的关注则少得多。古希腊文化痴迷于从其音乐生活中去除“噪音”，但这只是其规范歌曲计划的开始。在许多方面，对乐器调音的热情必须被视为一种隐喻，象征着一种更为雄心勃勃的追求，即在整个社会中灌输和谐。

We now increasingly encounter a divide in the musical lives of nations, communities, even households. The politically sanctioned music, approved by elites, is celebrated, taught, propagated. But that can’t hide the existence of a different sphere of music, far less dignified—although few details about it have been preserved for posterity. We know it existed, if only because of the vehement attacks against it. The ruling powers, alas, did little to document these scorned performances for our inspection. This is the single biggest reason why our accounts of music history are so one-sided, emphasizing the respectability of song while downplaying its capacity for subversion. In the context of ancient Greek music, this manifests itself as a deep fixation on tuning systems—a subject that has received enormous attention from scholars, more than any other aspect of the ancient music ecosystem, and with far less scrutiny applied to the discords and dangerous sounds such systems were designed to exclude. The culture was obsessed with removing ‘noise’ from its musical life, but that was only the beginning of its program to regulate song. In many ways, the zeal for tuning musical instruments must be viewed as a metaphor for a much more ambitious quest to instill harmony in society at large.

在柏拉图的著作中，我们反复遇到这两种不同的音乐。一种音乐对于一个秩序井然的社会至关重要；另一种音乐则充满风险，必须谨慎对待，甚至可能被禁止。柏拉图一定非常理解颠覆性音乐的概念——他不断发出警告。“小心改变音乐形式，因为它会威胁到整个体系，”他在《理想国》中宣称。这段话很可能就是艾伦·金斯堡那句伪造的柏拉图语录的来源：“当音乐模式改变时，城墙会摇晃。”这位哲学家从未用如此直白的语言表达过，但他无疑担心歌曲会破坏社会秩序。然而，柏拉图也认为，谨慎使用音乐可以塑造性格，甚至塑造灵魂——事实上，“灵魂音乐”一词，尽管带有摩城音乐的内涵，或许才是描述柏拉图至高无上的歌曲理念的最恰当的方式^。1

In Plato, we repeatedly encounter these two different kinds of music. One type is essential to a well-ordered society; the other is risky and must be dealt with cautiously, or perhaps even prohibited. Plato would have understood quite well the concept of subversive music—he constantly warns against it. “Beware of changing to a new form of music, since it threatens the whole system,” he proclaims in the Republic. This passage is probably the source of Allen Ginsberg’s spurious quote from Plato: “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.” The philosopher never said it in such stark words, but he no doubt feared that songs could undermine the social order. Yet Plato also argued that music, used prudently, could form character and even shape the soul—in fact, the term soul music, for all its Motown connotations, might be the most apt way of describing the supreme Platonic conception of song.¹

柏拉图提醒我们，甚至在我们能够接受语言的教育和影响之前，音乐就已经对我们产生了影响。从出生的那一刻起，婴儿就将声音作为干预周围环境的工具——比其他新生动物更为活跃。人类婴儿是所有生物中声音最丰富的，而缺乏语言能力所有父母都能从睡眠不足的经历中得到证实，这些工具既不能限制孩子哭闹的音量，也不能限制其持续时间。然而，反过来，世界可以通过摇晃和摇篮曲，用声音和节奏来安抚孩子。柏拉图认为，关键在于，即使在生命的最初阶段，歌曲也能纠正灵魂的失衡，让片刻前还不安分吵闹的婴儿恢复平静。两种声音相遇：婴儿杂乱的哭声和母亲抚慰心灵的摇篮曲。最终，灵魂音乐占据了上风。

Even before we can be educated and influenced by language, Plato reminds us, we are impacted by music. From the moment of birth, infants use sound as a tool of intervention with their surroundings—more so than other newborn animals. The human baby is the most vocal of all creatures, and the absence of linguistic tools limits neither the volume nor the persistence of the child’s cries, as all parents can testify from sleep-depriving experience. Yet the world, in turn, can placate the child with sound and rhythm, via rocking and lullabies. The key fact, for Plato, is that song, even at this first stage of life, can correct an imbalance in the soul, restoring calm to an infant who, only a moment before, was unsettled and clamoring. Two types of sound meet head-on: the disordered cry of the baby and the soul-soothing lullaby of the mother. The soul music prevails.

这两种音乐模式在柏拉图记述苏格拉底之死的《斐多篇》中形成了鲜明的对比。在这里，苏格拉底区分了“流行音乐”（dēmōdēs mousikē ）和“最伟大的音乐”（megistē mousikē）。前者富有诗意和神话色彩，而后者则与哲学相一致。面对死亡，苏格拉底解释说，他把自己的一生奉献给了后者。相反，他在教学中反复抨击低级音乐。我们在《会饮篇》中看到这一点，苏格拉底粗鲁地打发了一位演奏簧片乐器aulos的年轻女子，aulos 是一种簧片乐器，在翻译中通常被描述为长笛（我们将遵循这一惯例，尽管并不完全准确——这种双簧乐器听起来更像双簧管甚至风笛），并指出这种音乐只适合女性聆听。他对这种所谓笛子的厌恶在《理想国》中表现得更加明显，他警告说，笛子会消耗精神，甚至会切断灵魂的筋骨。他解释说，奥洛斯音乐是给醉鬼听的，但即使没有酒精，音乐本身也能让人陶醉。他震惊地发现，一些有责任心的人有时会听进这种有害的声音。“结果是，这些人变得脾气暴躁，容易发怒，并且充满不满。” ²

These two models of music stand out in stark contrast in the Phaedo, Plato’s account of the death of Socrates. Here Socrates differentiates between “popular music” (dēmōdēs mousikē) and the “greatest music” (megistē mousikē). The former is poetic and mythic, while the latter is aligned with philosophy. As he faces death, Socrates explains that he has devoted his life to the latter. The lower forms of music, in contrast, he has repeatedly attacked in his teachings. We see this in the Symposium, when Socrates rudely dismisses a young woman who plays the aulos, a reed instrument typically described as a flute in translations (we will follow that convention, although the fit isn’t precise—this double-reed instrument probably sounded more like an oboe or even bagpipes), noting that such music is suitable only for women to hear. His dislike of this so-called flute is even more pronounced in the Republic, where he warns that it dissipates the spirit and cuts out the very sinews of the soul. Aulos music is for drunkards, he explains, yet even the music itself can intoxicate, without the alcohol. He is horrified that responsible individuals sometimes open their ears to this pernicious sound. “The result is that such people become quick-tempered, prone to anger, and filled with discontent.”²

一件乐器就能做到这一切？然而，亚里士多德也对长笛（aulos）怀有同样的恐惧。“长笛并非一种能够表达道德品质的乐器，”他在《政治学》中警告道，“它太刺激了。” 随后，他提出了一个奇怪的支持论点：音乐家不可能一边吹笛子一边使用语言，因此这种音乐作为教育工具的潜力有限。在他看来，弦乐器更胜一筹，因为它们可以伴随道德上振奋人心的歌唱信息。这种肤浅的论点反复出现在针对奥洛斯的谩骂中，有时，吹奏乐器的乐手脸上的痛苦表情也被用来作为额外的支持。看看那个奥洛斯演奏者的脸！真恶心！亚里士多德也对旋律和节奏抱有坚定的信念；他解释说，有些旋律和节奏有助于美德，但有些则危险且令人陶醉。事实上，音乐的每个方面都需要政治上的考虑和指导。如果统治者选择不当，听众可能会陷入宗教狂热——在这里，这位哲学家的话让人联想到我们现在称之为萨满教的酒神仪式和习俗^。3

A musical instrument can do all that? Yet Aristotle shared this same horror of the aulos. “The flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character,” he warns in the Politics. “It is too exciting.” He then offers a strange supporting argument: namely, that a musician can’t play the flute and use language at the same time, and so the potential for this music to serve as a tool of education is limited. String instruments are superior, in his mind, because they can accompany morally uplifting, sung messages. This shallow argument shows up repeatedly in diatribes aimed at the aulos, and sometimes the grimace on the face of a musician blowing into the instrument is offered as additional support. Just look at the face of that aulos player! How disgusting! Aristotle also held strong convictions about melodies and rhythms; some contribute to virtue, he explains, but others are dangerous and intoxicating. Indeed, every aspect of music requires political consideration and guidance. If rulers choose poorly, listeners might enter into a religious frenzy—and here the philosopher’s words summon up images of Bacchic rites and practices that we would nowadays call shamanistic.³

西方政治哲学的两部奠基性著作——柏拉图的《理想国》和亚里士多德的《政治学》 ——竟然对一种特定的管乐器或任何一种音乐投入如此多的关注，这真是令人匪夷所思。然而，这些并非例外。我们可以在整个西方哲学中追溯到七弦琴和长笛之间的对立，一直到亚瑟·叔本华（他将吹笛子作为日常生活的一部分）、他的弟子弗里德里希·尼采（他提倡长笛，尽管他主要为钢琴和声乐创作音乐）以及更早的时期。尼采认为七弦琴和长笛象征着古代文化中对立的阿波罗和狄俄尼索斯倾向——前者强调制定规则和克制，后者则拥抱打破规则和非理性。里拉琴作为一种音准精准的弦乐器，促进着社会的和谐与秩序；而长笛则汲取人类的气息，发出震撼心灵的音色，因此往往成为煽动激情和狂喜的危险媒介。许多读者认为这种对立具有象征意义，但对于希腊思想家们而言，一些乐器并非仅仅是混乱的象征，实际上反而是造成混乱的根源，因此需要加以规范。

How odd that the two foundational works of Western political philosophy, Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, should devote so much attention to a specific wind instrument, or to any kind of music. Yet these are hardly exceptions. One can trace an opposition between the lyre and flute throughout the course of Western philosophy all the way down to Arthur Schopenhauer (who played the flute as part of a daily routine), his disciple Friedrich Nietzsche (who championed the flute, although he composed music primarily for piano and voice), and beyond. Nietzsche saw the lyre and flute as emblematic of the opposed Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in ancient culture—the former emphasizing rule-making and restraint, the latter embracing rule-breaking and irrationality. The lyre, as a well-tuned string instrument, promotes the harmony and order of society, while the flute draws on human breath for its soul-shaking sounds, and thus serves as a dangerous instigator of passion and ecstatic states. Many readers see this opposition as symbolic, but for the leading Greek thinkers, some musical instruments were not just emblems for disorder but actually contributing causes, and as such needed to be regulated.

我们或许认为，在现代社会，这样的争论已经抛诸脑后，但任何读过柏拉图现代继承者——例如艾伦·布鲁姆在其著作《美国精神的封闭》中——关于音乐的警示性论述的人，都会发现类似的论点，尽管电吉他取代了长笛，成为了道德感染的源头。布鲁姆被贴上了保守派知识分子的标签，但他的观点与现代马克思主义哲学家西奥多·阿多诺在左派中所倡导的观点惊人地一致，后者也担心流行音乐的负面影响。事实上，这些看似过时的想法却以惊人的频率出现在许多进步的现代思想家的作品中。例如，在让-保罗·萨特的小说《恶心》中，读者会看到一个令人惊讶的故事结局，主人公洛根丁通过聆听一段声乐录音治愈了他的存在焦虑——这一事件不可避免地让我们想起上文中柏拉图的描述，一个女人的歌声给困扰的灵魂带来平衡。无论一个人倡导什么样的政治结构，错误的音乐显然都会使其崩溃。也许这种演变最奇怪的方面是它颠覆了古人的哲学二分法。吉他，一种现代的里拉琴，如今却成了混乱的危险根源，而长笛则被视为一种端庄、低调的乐器，唤起人们的尊敬和秩序。这是音乐史上最引人注目的辩证法案例之一，即事物转化为对立面。

We may think we have left such debates behind in modern times, but anyone who has read cautionary statements on music from the modern heirs of Plato—for example, Allan Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind—will find similar arguments, although with the electric guitar replacing the flute as the source of moral contagion. Bloom is labeled as a conservative intellectual, but his views echo with surprising congruence those advocated on the Left by the modern Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, who also feared the negative impact of popular music. In fact, these seemingly old-fashioned ideas show up with surprising frequency in the works of many progressive modern thinkers. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, for example, the reader encounters a surprising resolution to the story when the protagonist Roquentin cures his existential angst by listening to a vocal recording—in an incident that inevitably reminds us of Plato’s description, cited above, of a woman’s singing bringing balance back to a troubled soul. No matter what political structure one advocates, the wrong music can apparently send it toppling. Perhaps the strangest aspect of this evolution is its reversal of the ancients’ philosophical dichotomy. The guitar, a kind of modern lyre, is now the dangerous source of disorder, while the flute is seen as a prim, subdued instrument evoking respectability and orderliness. This is one of the most striking examples of the dialectic at play in music history in which things turn into their opposites.

这并非偶然。吉他在二十世纪引起了轰动，因为它是非洲侨民攻击自公元前500 年以来一直主导西方音乐的毕达哥拉斯范式的焦点。随着布鲁斯吉他技术进入主流，它们证实了推弦音的使用并引入了传统音阶之外的声音。这种对毕达哥拉斯调音演奏观念的攻击——几个世纪以来，这种观念要求音乐家保持在精心划定的音阶范围内并保持正确的音调——有可能颠覆既定音乐的所有等级制度，包括社会等级和听觉等级。我们上面问过希腊人通过对调音的痴迷试图消除什么，虽然答案并不是布鲁斯，但毫无疑问是类似的。他们害怕那些在音阶和社会控制规则之外运作的危险音乐表现形式。

This is not mere happenstance. The guitar shook things up in the twentieth century because it was the focal point for the African diaspora’s attack on the Pythagorean paradigm that had dominated Western music since 500 BC. As blues guitar techniques entered the mainstream, they validated the use of bent notes and introduced sounds outside conventional scales. This assault on Pythagorean notions of playing in tune—which for centuries had required musicians to keep within the boundaries of carefully delineated scales and maintain a proper tone—threatened to overturn all the hierarchies of established music, both social and aural. We asked above what the Greeks were trying to eliminate by their obsession with tuning, and although the answer isn’t specifically the blues, it was no doubt something along the same lines. They feared those dangerous manifestations of music that operate outside the rulebook of both scales and social control.

这种独特的音符弯曲最初出现在布鲁斯音乐中，后来传播到爵士乐、R&B、摇滚乐和其他表演风格，最初是用刀子和破碎的瓶子碎片来实现的，后来，随着一系列插件技术的出现，武器再次进入音乐创作领域，就像人类歌曲的初现雏形一样。这些弯曲吉他音符的激进实践者似乎想要对那些被既定秩序所认可的乐器——那些古代哲学家所钟爱的调音琴弦——施加物理暴力。早期布鲁斯吉他手将刀置于吉他弦上时，并非真正想要摧毁毕达哥拉斯及其关于“调音灵魂”的哲学——但看起来确实如此。而且，从某种程度上来说，他们确实在这么做，尽管是在概念和象征层面。这种非洲的反范式代表了两千多年来对音乐编纂成离散音符体系的最有力的攻击。刀子可以以一种手或手指无法做到的方式弯曲吉他音符。手持武器，颠覆性的演奏者可以在不受约束的声音中重新发现音乐的起源。因此，现代吉他代表了柏拉图两千多年前在长笛中察觉到的确切危险：宇宙的失调。

The distinctive bending of notes that first emerged in the blues, and later spread to jazz, R&B, rock, and other performance styles, was achieved at first with knives and parts of broken bottles, and later with a host of plugged-in technologies. Once again, weapons enter the sphere of music-making, as was the case with the first stirrings of human song, and it almost seems as if the radical practitioners of these bent guitar notes want to do physical violence to the very instruments that had been sanctioned by the established orders, those tuned strings so beloved by ancient philosophers. When the early blues guitarists put a knife to their guitar strings, they weren’t really trying to kill Pythagoras and his philosophy of the well-tuned soul—but it sure looks like it. And, in a way, they were doing just that, albeit on a conceptual and symbolic level. This African counter-paradigm represented the most forceful attack in more than two millennia on the codification of music into a system of discrete notes. The knife could bend a guitar note in a way that a hand or finger could not. With a weapon in hand, the subversive performer could rediscover music’s origins in unconstrained sound. As such, the modern guitar represents the exact danger that Plato had perceived in the flute more than two millennia before: an untuning of the universe.

故事中最奇特的部分在于：柏拉图弥留之际，这位伟大的哲学家没有请亲朋好友来安慰，而是选择聆听一位色雷斯少女演奏奥洛斯琴——他一生都强烈反对的乐器。他如今渴望的慰藉并非由调音精准的里拉琴提供，而是需要危险的笛子。在他面临人生中最个人化的转折点——生命终结，灵魂超越统治者和法律的束缚——时，这种维护政治体系的音乐已不再适用。这是西方音乐史上一个非凡的时刻，却鲜少被人察觉。柏拉图欣然接受了他曾竭力阻止的宇宙失调。

Here’s the oddest part of the story: When Plato was on his deathbed, instead of summoning a family member or friend to comfort him, the great philosopher wanted to listen to a Thracian maiden play the aulos, the same instrument he had vehemently opposed throughout his life. The comfort he now desired could not be provided by the well-tuned lyre, but required the dangerous flute. The type of music that upholds a political system was no longer suitable as he faced that most personal of all transitions, when life ends and the soul moves beyond the sway of rulers and laws. This is an extraordinary moment in the history of Western music, but one that is rarely even noticed. Plato embraced the very untuning of the universe he had worked so hard to prevent.

这场临终的皈依见证了禁忌音乐得以合法化的变迁。然而，它也提醒我们禁忌歌曲的魅力。即使是最直言不讳的批评者也无法抗拒它们的魅力。阿多诺虽然对摇滚乐怀有敌意，但他年轻时学习了吉他，后来回忆起吉他不和谐音调所激发的那种陶醉状态。就连艾伦·布鲁姆，布鲁姆对电吉他如此敌视，却认识到了音乐的力量——或许比他的批评者们更加深刻。“音乐是人类灵魂在最狂喜、最惊恐的状态下的媒介，”他断言道。如今，有多少唱片制作人对歌曲的魅力有布鲁姆一半的信心？⁴

This deathbed conversion is testimony to the fluidity with which forbidden music can become legitimized. Yet it also reminds us of the allure of prohibited songs. Even their most vocal critics cannot resist their charms. Adorno, despite his hostility to rock music, learned the guitar as a youth, and later recalled the state of intoxication inspired by the dissonance of its sounds. Even Allan Bloom, so hostile to the electric guitar, recognized the power of music—perhaps far more than his critics did. “Music is the medium of the human soul in its most ecstatic condition of wonder and terror,” he asserted. How many current-day record producers possess even half of Bloom’s confidence in the enchantment of song?⁴

在我们这个时代，我们往往将政治学和音乐视为截然不同的学科。如果你在选举之夜收看CNN，你不会指望看到关于歌曲的讨论。你也不会指望在学校的公民课上看到关于长笛和吉他优劣的离题讨论。但对柏拉图和亚里士多德——或者艾伦·布鲁姆——来说，这并非题外话。他们敬畏音乐，并清晰地把握了音乐的颠覆性潜力。

In our own time, we tend to see political science and music as completely different disciplines. If you tune into CNN on election night, you don’t expect to encounter discussions about songs. Nor do you anticipate a digression on the relative merits of the flute and the guitar in a civics class at school. But this was no digression for Plato and Aristotle—or Allan Bloom, for that matter. They were afraid of music, and grasped with great clarity its subversive potential.

在此背景下，我们得以接触到亚里士多德的学生、被誉为音乐学之父的阿里斯托塞努斯的开创性著作。阿里斯托塞努斯现存的著作《和声要素》是我们第一部专门研究音乐结构的著作，但其中最引人入胜的部分探讨了作者对其他研究该主题的方法的不满，尤其是那些可能破坏他新的声音科学的叛逆做法。一方面，阿里斯托塞努斯试图与极端的毕达哥拉斯学派划清界限，后者认为音乐是纯粹的数学问题。然而，他更加激烈地谴责了一个被他称为“ harmonikoi ”（和声学家）的群体，他猛烈抨击这些演奏家的无知和自命不凡。他的叙述含糊不清，有时甚至自相矛盾，但他提供的许多细节让我想起了20世纪早期对爵士乐和布鲁斯音乐家的谴责。阿里斯托塞努斯对和声演奏家们在乐器中寻找音乐，而不是承认精心设计的理论架构的优越性感到恼火；他不喜欢他们使用的简单图表，就像爵士乐手的伪书一样，忽略了更丰富的细节；他也鄙视他们试图讨好业余爱好者。1902年在埃及希贝发现的一份莎草纸中，出现了另一份针对和声演奏家的攻击，但这份文件的细节也很少，尽管我们可以清楚地感觉到，作者憎恶该团体违反规则的行为，认为这是一种道德上的懈怠。这些谩骂并没有提供足够的证据来证明和声演奏家们的不端行为。关于和声学派歌曲的总结，学者们对他们活动的范围和细节仍未确定。正如音乐史上经常出现的情况一样，我们只能根据幸存的指控和责备来重建颠覆体制的歌曲。然而，这些谴责的强度表明，理性而系统的音乐学方法的兴起并非没有反对。几乎从一开始就出现了一批持不同政见者，他们的反抗招致了谴责和边缘化。在这种情况下，和声学派实际上被噤声了，或者至少被阻止在后人珍视的幸存文本中分享他们的观点。

In this context, we arrive at the pioneering work of Aristoxenus, Aristotle’s pupil, who has been called the father of musicology. Aristoxenus’s surviving text Elements of Harmony is our first specialized study of the structure of music, but the most interesting parts of it deal with the author’s irritation at other approaches to the subject, especially those rebellious practices that threatened to undermine his new science of sound. On the one hand, Aristoxenus wanted to distance himself from the extreme Pythagoreans, who believed that music was a matter of pure mathematics. Yet he was even fiercer in denouncing a group he called the harmonikoi—the harmonicists—performers he bitterly attacked for their ignorance and pretensions. His account is vague and sometimes contradicts itself, but many of the details he provides remind me of early twentieth-century denunciations of jazz and blues musicians. Aristoxenus was irritated by how the harmonicists found music in their instruments instead of recognizing the superiority of elaborate theoretical schema; he disliked the simple diagrams they used, which, like a jazz player’s fake books, left out the richer details; and he scorned their desire to court the favor of amateurs. Another attack against the harmonikoi appears in a papyrus discovered at Hibeh in Egypt in 1902, but here, too, details are scant, although we get a clear sense that the writer abhorred this group’s rule-breaking practices, viewing them as a kind of moral laxness. These diatribes provide no adequate summary of the songs of the harmonikoi, and scholars are still undecided on the scope and specifics of their activities. As is so often the case in the history of music, we are left to reconstruct songs that subvert the system merely from surviving accusations and reproofs. Yet the very intensity of these denunciations indicates that the rise of a rational and systematic approach to musicology did not happen without opposition. A cadre of dissidents emerged virtually at the outset, and they earned condemnation and marginalization for their resistance. In this instance, the harmonikoi were effectively silenced, or at least prevented from sharing their perspectives in the surviving texts cherished by posterity.

对古人来说，针对音乐的敌意和怀疑远非哲学层面的问题。到了柏拉图时代，像阿尔西比亚德斯这样的政治领袖也表达了对奥洛斯的蔑视，并谴责其粗俗的关联。一句形容奥洛斯演奏者粗俗的谚语在希腊人中成为谚语，即使是演奏这种乐器的最伟大的人也会遭受蔑视和嘲讽。关于伊斯梅尼亚斯（Ismenias）的许多故事流传至今，他是一位底比斯奥洛斯演奏家，活跃于公元前400年左右，以其精湛的技艺和他声称的音乐具有的治疗功效而闻名。但当哲学家安提西尼听到对这位艺术家能力的赞扬时，他打趣道，除非伊斯梅尼亚斯品行不良，否则不可能成为如此技艺精湛的奥洛斯演奏家。

For the ancients, the hostility and suspicion directed at music was more than just a matter for philosophizing. By the time of Plato, political leaders such as Alcibiades were expressing their contempt for the aulos and denouncing its coarse associations. A phrase referring to the aulos player’s vulgarity became a proverb among the Greeks, and even the greatest performers on this instrument found themselves subject to scorn and ridicule. Many stories survive about Ismenias, a Theban aulos player who flourished around 400 BC and was famous both for his virtuosity and for the healing properties he claimed for his music. But when the philosopher Antisthenes heard praise of this artist’s ability, he quipped that Ismenias couldn’t be such a skilled aulos performer unless he had a bad character.

人们日益关注音乐的政治影响，这有助于我们理解原本令人费解的情况。现在我们可以理解，为什么萨福，这位早年被誉为最伟大的抒情歌曲实践者，会在两个世纪后沦为一个喜剧人物。现存的资料告诉我们，萨福是阿米普西阿斯、安菲斯、安提法尼斯、狄菲勒斯、埃菲普斯和提摩克勒斯喜剧作品的主角。我们对希腊中期喜剧（大约公元前400 年至 320 年在雅典盛行）的信息几乎完全是二手的，但我们知道这些剧作家依赖于对典型人物的嘲讽。在这种背景下，萨福的反复出现令人不安地证明了后毕达哥拉斯时代人们对音乐的态度发生了显著转变希腊世界。关于她流传至今的相互矛盾的故事，至少在一定程度上可以解释为，一些人将音乐视为个人情感的宣泄渠道，而另一些人则希望音乐服务于宗教和政治精英的需求，两者之间的分歧日益扩大。一方面，我们发现了一位端庄的萨福，她指导并激励着她圈子里的年轻女性。另一方面，我们也看到了对萨福的不同看法的萌芽，这种看法危险而放荡。这种二分法造成的混乱如此之大，以至于修辞学家埃利安最终认定，莱斯博斯岛上一定居住着两个名叫萨福的女性：一个是诗人，另一个是妓女。更有可能的是，只有一个萨福存在，但两个敌对阵营为她的遗产而争斗^。5

This growing concern over the political ramifications of music helps us understand otherwise puzzling circumstances. We now can grasp why Sappho, who had been honored in an earlier day as the greatest practitioner of lyric song, was turned into a comic figure two centuries later. Surviving sources tell us that Sappho was the title character in comedic works by Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Dïphilus, Ephippus, and Timocles. Our information on Greek Middle Comedy, which flourished in Athens from around 400 to 320 BC, is almost entirely secondhand, but we know that these dramatists relied on the ridicule of stock figures. In this context, the recurring appearance of Sappho serves as disturbing testimony to a marked shift in attitudes toward music in the post-Pythagorean Greek world. The conflicting stories surrounding her that have survived can also be explained, at least in part, by the growing divide between those who embraced music as a channel for individual emotions and those who wanted it to serve the needs of religion and political elites. On the one hand, we find evidence of a dignified Sappho who mentors and inspires the young women in her circle. On the other hand, we see the stirrings of a different view of Sappho, dangerous and libidinous. The confusion this dichotomy caused was so great that the rhetorician Aelian eventually decided that two different women named Sappho must have resided on Lesbos, one a poet, the other a whore. More likely, only one Sappho existed, but two warring camps battled over her legacy.⁵

这种分歧也有助于我们理解为什么希腊历史学家埃福鲁斯（约公元前400-330 年）坚持认为音乐只会助长“欺骗和庸医”。他生活的时代与剧作家讽刺萨福的时代恰好相反。这句话表明，即使在毕达哥拉斯学派破裂之后，在神秘治疗仪式中使用音乐的萨满教习俗依然存在——我们之前对伊斯梅尼亚斯的音乐治疗、巴门尼德的冥界之旅以及恩培多克勒关于他能使灵魂复活的非凡断言的考察都支持了这一假设。我们无法确切地说，在毕达哥拉斯学派破裂之后，有多少音乐治疗师继续从事这些声名狼藉的艺术，但那些敢于这样做的人越来越多地被视为江湖骗子，受到文化精英的蔑视，就像如今店面灵媒和占星家受到嘲笑一样。近年来，古代的音乐治疗师也成为大学古典学家的耻辱之源，他们发现复活死者和前往冥界旅行的概念最好局限于童话故事和民间传说，并且与他们学科的尊严不相容^。6

This divide also helps us understand why the Greek historian Ephorus of Cyme (circa 400–330 BC), who lived during the same period when dramatists lampooned Sappho, insisted that music only served to promote “deceit and quackery.” The phrase suggests that shamanistic practices involving the use of music in occult healing rituals persisted even after the Pythagorean rupture—a hypothesis supported by our earlier consideration of Ismenias’s musical cures, Parmenides’s trip to the underworld, and Empedocles’s extraordinary assertion that he could raise a soul from the dead. We can’t say with any certainty how many musical healers continued to practice these disreputable arts after the Pythagorean rupture, but those who dared to do so were increasingly treated as charlatans, scorned by cultural elites the same way storefront psychics and astrologists are derided in the current day. In more recent years, the musical healers of antiquity would also become a source of shame for university classicists, who found the notion of raising the dead and journeying to the underworld subjects best restricted to fairy tales and folklore, and incompatible with the dignity of their academic discipline.⁶

我们在此也发现了音乐与奴隶制之间更为突出的联系——这一主题在接下来的篇幅中反复出现。这种对表演者的贬低与我们如今的期望格格不入，因为如今音乐家的职业备受追捧，而那些达到这一职业巅峰的人被视为社会精英成员。希腊人确实如此对待一些音乐家——例如，歌唱（如果他们确实歌唱，而不仅仅是背诵）光荣事迹的抒情诗人，或受认可的音乐比赛的获胜者。但许多音乐领域对正派人士来说是禁区。亚里士多德在《政治学》第八卷中表达了对斯巴达合唱团长在表演中吹笛子的恐惧，或者对奴隶以外的任何人学习这种乐器感到恐惧。然而，对奥洛斯演奏者的需求很大——他们为划船者定下速度，在祭祀和聚会上表演，为行军伴奏，以及其他场合。在这些情况下，奴隶会被征召，如果自由人参与，他们就会被这种堕落的音乐创作形式所玷污。许多奴隶音乐家似乎来自东方。弗里吉亚人和吕底亚人经常被提及——即使在今天，这些术语仍用于表示音乐模式，但在古代，他们无疑与来自现今土耳其这些地区的奴隶表演者有关。

We also encounter here a more prominent linkage between music and slavery—a recurring theme in the pages ahead. This debasement of the performer could hardly be more opposed to our current-day expectations, when the vocation of musician is highly coveted, and those who reach the pinnacle of this profession are treated as elite members of society. The Greeks certainly treated some musicians in this way—for example, the lyric poets who sang (if in fact they did sing, and not merely recite) of glorious deeds, or the winners of sanctioned music competitions. But many spheres of music were simply off limits to decent people. Aristotle expresses horror, in Book 8 of his Politics, that a chorus leader in Sparta would play the flute in performance, or that anyone other than a slave would learn this instrument. Yet aulos players were in great demand—to set the pace for rowers, to perform at sacrifices and symposia, to accompany marching, and in other settings. In these instances, slaves were enlisted, and if free individuals participated, they were tainted by the shame associated with this degraded form of music-making. Many of these slave musicians appear to have come from the east. Phrygians and Lydians are often mentioned—even today these terms are used to denote musical modes, but in antiquity they were no doubt associated with the slave performers who hailed from these parts of current-day Turkey.

不同旋律调式的专业术语竟然起源于奴隶制，这或许有些奇怪，但这种联系揭示了外来者在音乐创新中所扮演的重要角色。本书稍后将更详细地探讨这个棘手的问题，但此时值得注意的是，对二十世纪音乐影响最大的音阶——布鲁斯音阶，也起源于奴隶及其后代。在希腊，本文所描述的对音乐的新态度与奴隶制的显著增长相吻合。不仅是富人，大多数雅典家庭可能都至少拥有一名奴隶。在这种环境下，就像在南北战争前的美国南方一样，奴隶群体获得了认可，成为音乐才华和娱乐的主要来源。令人警醒的是，即使在今天，当音乐学生学习吕底亚调式和弗里吉亚调式时，他们学习的术语最初指的是与这些声音相关的不同被俘人口群体。

It may seem strange that the technical terms for different melodic modes would originate with slavery, but such connections reveal important truths about the role of outsiders in musical innovation. This thorny issue will be dealt with in greater detail later in this book, but it’s worth noting at this point that the scale that exerted the greatest impact on music in the twentieth century, the blues scale, also originated among slaves and the descendants of slaves. In Greece, the new attitudes toward music described here coincided with a significant increase in slaveholding. Not just the wealthy, but most Athenian households, probably owned at least one slave. In this setting, as in the Antebellum American South, the slave population gained recognition as a major source of musical talent and entertainment. It’s sobering to consider that, even today, when music students learn about the Lydian and Phrygian modes, they are being taught a terminology that initially referred to different groups of captive populations associated with these sounds.

真是出乎意料！古希腊人创造了西方历史上最仇外的社会之一—— “仇外”一词本身就源于希腊语“xenos”，意为“陌生人”或“外国人”。同样，我们的“野蛮人”一词最初是一个希腊词，指任何不说希腊语的群体。对古人来说，它成为了埃及人、波斯人、弗里吉亚人以及许多其他社会成员的统称。然而，尽管希腊人对外来者不屑一顾，但他们发现自己被这些文化所吸引，认为它们是希腊理性主义过度的解药。公元前五世纪后期，外国邪教，尤其是那些激烈的狂欢性质的邪教，极度流行，既证明了这种非理性活动的吸引力，也证明了希腊人普遍认为最强大的教派来自他们境外。这种对更神奇事物的热情，使得这些古板的古人转向了各种各样的外来仪式，包括（根据古典学家 E.R. 多兹的说法）“对弗里吉亚‘山母’库柏勒的崇拜，以及对色雷斯‘山母’本迪斯的崇拜；色雷斯-弗里吉亚人的萨巴齐乌斯秘仪，一种野蛮的非希腊化的狄俄尼索斯；以及亚洲‘垂死之神’阿提斯和阿多尼斯的仪式。”我们可以有把握地认为，音乐在所有这些活动中都发挥了关键作用，并进一步促成了这样一种普遍观念：激动人心、充满争议的歌曲与“野蛮人”的影响有关^。7

What an unlikely turn of events! The ancient Greeks created one of the most xenophobic societies in Western history—the very word xenophobia comes from the Greek word xenos, signifying “stranger” or “foreigner.” By the same token, our word barbarian was initially a Greek word referring to any group that didn’t speak Greek. For the ancients, it became a catch-all label for Egyptians, Persians, Phrygians, and members of a host of other societies. Yet for all their scorn of the outsider, the Greeks found themselves drawn to these cultures for a kind of antidote to the excesses of Greek rationalism. The immense popularity of foreign cults during the late fifth century BC, especially those of an intense, orgiastic nature, testifies both to the allure of such non-rational practices and to widespread belief among the Greeks that the most powerful sects came from outside their own borders. This zeal for something more magical led these staid ancients to turn to a wide range of imported rituals, including, according to classicist E. R. Dodds, “the worship of the Phrygian ‘Mountain Mother,’ Cybele, and that of her Thracian counterpart, Bendis; the mysteries of the Thraco-Phrygian Sabazius, a sort of savage un-Hellenized Dionysus; and the rites of the Asiatic ‘dying gods,’ Attis and Adonis.” We can safely assume that music played a key role in all these practices and contributed further to the pervasive notion that exciting, controversial songs were associated with ‘barbarian’ influences.⁷

这种明显的音乐阶层划分是我们从希腊人那里继承下来的最持久的遗产。从那时起，我们徒劳地寻求西方世界统一的音乐文化。一些音乐家通过与文化精英的联系获得地位，而另一些则因其腐朽的影响而被鄙视、边缘化、审查或惩罚。音乐可以是美德的，也可以是罪恶的；可以是被赞扬的，也可以是嘲笑的；可以是高贵的，也可以是卑微的；可以是被颂扬的，也可以是被禁止的。更奇怪的是，同一位音乐家和歌曲可能会根据各种情况从一个极端走向另一个极端，而其中许多情况在现存的记录中几乎没有被提及。

This marked stratification in music is our most lasting legacy from the Greeks. From this juncture onward, we seek in vain for a unified musical culture in the Western world. Some musicians gain status through connections with cultural elites, while others are disdained, marginalized, censored, or punished for their corrupting influence. Music can be virtuous or sinful, praised or ridiculed, dignified or degraded, celebrated or forbidden. Even stranger, the same musician and songs can move from one extreme to the other depending on a host of circumstances, many of them barely mentioned in the surviving records.

换句话说，从这个阶段开始，任何试图把握音乐领域突然转变和明显创新的尝试，都必须从刑事侦查人员提出的同一个问题入手：谁受益？或者简单地说，谁受益？为什么这种音乐在特定时期蓬勃发展？在竞争激烈的社会声音空间中，哪些力量支持或阻碍了它的崛起？此外，当我们目睹某些类型的歌曲受到推崇——而且这些歌曲得到了那些有权批准的人的认可——时，我们应该问问，还有哪些类型的音乐没有通过这些歌曲的检验。最重要的是，当我们发现这段历史被呈现得仿佛歌曲仅仅是歌曲，价值中立，缺乏这些充满张力的联想时，我们应该怀疑，故事中最重要的部分被遗漏了。

In other words, from this stage onward, any attempt to grasp sudden shifts and apparent innovations in the sphere of music must start with the same question criminal investigators ask: Cui bono, or, in simple translation, Who benefits? Why did this kind of music flourish at this particular moment, and what forces supported or opposed its ascendancy in the hotly contested social soundspace? Moreover, when we witness the celebration of certain types of songs—approved by those in a position to grant approval—we ought to ask what other types of music did not meet their litmus tests. And, most important of all, when we find this history presented as if songs are mere songs, value neutral and lacking these charged associations, we ought to suspect that the most important part of the story has been left out.

9

9

不男子气概的音乐

Unmanly Music

古代音乐的断裂越来越多地以关于男子气概的争论的形式出现。即使在柏拉图时代，我们也能看到这种定义合适歌曲的新方式的轮廓。在《法律》中，他解释了区分“适合女性的歌曲和适合男性的歌曲”的必要性，并补充说“至少有必要立法规定这些事项的轮廓”。他继续指出，男子气概的音乐应该包含“任何倾向于勇气的东西”，而女性的歌曲应该“由她们天性的差异决定”，从而包含“任何倾向于有序和温和的东西” ^。1

The rupture in ancient music increasingly takes on the form of a debate over manliness. Even in Plato’s time, we can see the outline of this new way of defining what constitutes an appropriate song. In The Laws, he explains the need for distinguishing “the songs fitting for females from those fitting for males,” adding that “it’s necessary to legislate at least the outlines of these matters.” He goes on to suggest that manly music would include “whatever inclines to courage,” while the songs of women should be “determined by the very way they differ in nature,” and thus encompass “whatever leans rather toward the orderly and the moderate.”¹

这份宣言中透着令人不安的虚伪。希腊人深知女性的歌曲绝非温和——他们文化遗产中几乎所有关于危险音乐的著名叙事都将责任归咎于女性。荷马史诗中那些诱人的塞壬之歌，引诱男性走向死亡，以及欧里庇得斯在《酒神的女祭司们》中描述的暴力狄俄尼索斯教派，其中女性参与者在狂喜的恍惚中盲目杀戮，都体现了这一点。几乎任何包含过度内容的歌曲，情感——无论是充满激情的爱情抒情诗，还是葬礼上哀悼者的哀号——都与女性的情感脆弱性息息相关。对希腊人来说，这种激情通常是一种缺陷，而非美德。在《法律篇》中，柏拉图描述的是女性应该唱的歌，而不是她们经常唱的歌。

There’s a disturbing hypocrisy in this proclamation. The Greeks were aware that women’s songs were anything but moderate—almost every famous narrative of dangerous music in their cultural heritage assigned the blame on women. We see this in the account of the beguiling Siren songs of Homer, which lure men to their deaths, and in the violent Dionysian cults, depicted by Euripides in the Bacchae, whose female participants kill blindly while in an ecstatic trance. Almost any kind of song that contained excessive feeling—whether a passionate love lyric or the wailing lament of a mourner at a funeral—was associated with the emotional susceptibility of women. For the Greeks, this element of passion was typically a defect, not a virtue. In The Laws, Plato was describing the songs women ought to sing, not the ones they were often associated with.

几个世纪过去了，这种对缺乏男子气概的音乐的恐惧愈演愈烈。到了罗马人，这种恐惧演变成了对其音乐文化中女性化特征的极度担忧。基督教则更是不遗余力，竭尽所能地控制女性的淫秽歌曲——教皇的谴责、教会会议的裁决、讲坛上严厉的宣告，以及忏悔室里低声的劝诫。我们在穆斯林世界也发现了同样的执念，在那里，mukhannathun（或许最好翻译为“女性化的男人”，这个群体可能还包括太监、同性恋者和其他人）的歌曲既流行又极具争议。在中国，正如我们在第四章中看到的，学者们运用精心设计的方案，用儒家思想重新诠释女性歌曲，其非凡的结果是，女性形象从歌词中消失，并成为男性主导的统治阶级的政治信条。正如《源氏物语》所描绘的，我们在日本社会也发现了类似的紧张局势。女性的音乐技能被视为社会关系的重要组成部分，但她们的表演往往被隐藏起来，因为这种音乐可能引发道德危机。无论我们将视角转向古代和中世纪的哪个时期，歌曲都与性别角色息息相关，并因此受到赞扬、否定或重新诠释。或许，在当今时代，我们依然保留着柏拉图的某些虚伪，一方面将女性流行歌手奉为迷人的塞壬，另一方面又质疑这种名声和赞誉中固有的明显物化。

This fear of unmanly music would only grow stronger with the passing centuries. With the Romans it would evolve into an obsessive concern over the effeminacy of their musical culture. Christianity raised the ante even more, striving to control the wicked songs of women through every tool at its disposal—papal denunciations, church council rulings, fire-and-brimstone pronouncements from the pulpit, and whispered exhortations in the confessional. We find the same fixation in the Muslim world, where the songs of mukhannathun—perhaps best translated as effeminate men, a group that might also have included eunuchs, homosexuals, and others—were both popular and intensely controversial. In China, as we saw in Chapter 4, scholars employed elaborate schemes to reinterpret women’s songs in terms of Confucian teachings, with the extraordinary result of making the women disappear from their own lyrics and turning these songs into political tenets for the male-dominated ruling class. We find a similar tension in Japanese society, as depicted in The Tale of Genji, where the musical skills of women are recognized as a key part of social relationships, but they often perform while hidden from view, because of the moral danger associated with this music. No matter where we turn our view in ancient and medieval times, songs are connected to gender roles, and praised, dismissed, or reinterpreted on that basis. Perhaps we retain some of Plato’s hypocrisy in the current day when we celebrate female pop singers as alluring sirens even while questioning the marked objectification inherent in this kind of fame and acclaim.

在《音乐论》（De Musica）一书中，作者不详，但最初被认为是普鲁塔克所作，我们发现了对当前音乐堕落状态的不满，尤其是其缺乏男子气概的品质——罗马人经常表达的担忧是从希腊人那里继承下来的。前辈们。“古人在音乐的培养中尊重其尊严，就像他们在所有其他追求中一样，”作者解释道，“而现代人却拒绝了其严肃的部分，他们没有采用昔日强劲、充满灵感、为神所珍视的音乐，而是将一种女性化的啁啾声带入舞台。” 这篇论文继续批评吕底亚调式，因为它“音调高亢”且“适合哀歌”——这里我们再次想起，古代和中世纪的权威人士认为哀歌与女性的软弱和对强烈情感的敏感性有关。然后，作者赞扬了多利亚调式，与之形成对比的是，多利亚调式的“宏伟和尊严”。文中声称，多利亚调式的声音“适合尚武且温和的男性”。我注意到，多利亚调式是希腊人以自己的名字命名的，与那些以外国人的名字命名的、不太值得称道的调式形成对比^。2

In the discourse De Musica, of unknown authorship but initially attributed to Plutarch, we find an irritated complaint about the debased state of current music, especially its unmanly qualities—an oft-expressed concern that the Romans inherited from their Greek predecessors. “In the cultivation of music the ancients respected its dignity, as they did in all other pursuits,” the author explains, “while the moderns have rejected its graver parts, and instead of the music of former days, strong, inspired and dear to the gods, introduce into the theaters an effeminate twittering.” The treatise goes on to criticize the Lydian mode, because it is “high-pitched” and “appropriate to lamentation”—here we are again reminded that the lament, for ancient and medieval authorities, is connected to female weakness and susceptibility to overpowering emotions. Then the author praises the Dorian mode, in contrast, for its “grandeur and dignity.” Its sound, the text claims, is “proper for warlike and temperate men.” I note that the Dorian mode was one the Greeks named after themselves, in contrast to the less praiseworthy modes named after foreigners.²

同样，希腊文化也努力将羞耻的性音乐转化为更受尊重的事物。悲剧和喜剧必然都源于生育仪式。悲剧的词源将tragos（山羊）和aeidein（歌唱）两个词融合在一起——字面意思是山羊（祭祀牺牲品）的歌声。但在转化为戏剧性场面的过程中，人类主角变成了祭品。喜剧源于阴茎勃起节，是牺牲品死亡的平衡。因此，这里既有复活之神的两面，也有唤起死亡的悲剧和庆祝重生的喜剧。然而，这些充满情欲和仪式感的起源在某个阶段必然被视为一种尴尬，因此在这些表演中运用了一种更纯粹的审美视角。罗马人继承了这种纯粹的理想，我们也从罗马人那里继承了它。相比之下，舞台剧和音乐剧的性化起源却隐藏在时间的迷雾中。

By the same token, Greek culture strived to transform the shameful music of sexuality into something more respectable. Both tragedy and comedy must have arisen from fertility rites. The etymology of tragedy brings together the words tragos (goat) and aeidein (to sing)—it is literally the song of a goat, the sacrificial victim. But in the transformation to dramatic spectacle, the human protagonist becomes the sacrifice. Comedy comes from the priapic festivals, and is the counterweight to the death of the victim. So here are both sides of the resurrecting god, the tragedy evoking the death, the comedy celebrating the rebirth. Yet these lust-ridden and ritualistic origins must have been considered an embarrassment at some stage, and a more purely aesthetic perspective was applied to these performances. The Romans inherited this purified ideal, and we have taken it on from the Romans. The sexualized origins of stage plays and musicals, in contrast, are hidden in the mists of time.

罗马的杰出人物曾反复重申这些关于音乐使人丧失男子气概的严重警告。老塞内加担心“令人作呕的歌舞活动”腐蚀了年轻人，不知不觉中，他们就“扎起了辫子，嗓音也变得像女人一样轻快”。昆体良则抱怨说，音乐“被淫荡的旋律所阉割”。我们女性化的舞台。”小普林尼明确地将他那个时代堕落的演说家的“缺乏男子气概的演说”与舞台演员的歌曲进行了比较。事实上，歌曲的负面含义非常明显，以至于演说家会指责对手“唱歌”——这种指控让人联想到软弱和女性化。类似的观点也体现在英语术语sing-song中，它经常被用来讽刺那些说话者的声音，他们的声音柔弱、悦耳，缺乏力量和坚定性^。3

Eminent Romans repeated these grave warnings about the emasculating dangers of music again and again. Seneca the Elder fretted that the “revolting pursuits of singing and dancing” corrupted the youth, and before you knew it they were “braiding their hair and thinning their voices to a feminine lilt.” Quintilian grumbled that music had been “emasculated by the lascivious melodies of our effeminate stage.” Pliny the Younger explicitly compared the “unmanly elocution” of the debased orators of his time to the songs of stage performers. Indeed, the negative connotations of song were so pronounced that orators would criticize their opponents by accusing them of ‘singing’—a charge that brought with it associations of weakness and womanliness. A similar view is embedded in the English term sing-song, which is often used to ridicule the voice of a speaker whose effete, melodious proclamations lack power and firmness.³

在那个时期，音乐创作是多么可耻？罗马历史学家李维告诉我们，早期罗马剧院的演员并不演唱自己的歌曲——他们只是在舞台上做出手势，而实际的发声工作则由其他人完成。许多学者认为这种说法难以置信。“很难相信悲剧和喜剧是这样上演的，”古典学家HD·乔斯林写道。学者桑德·戈德堡对此表示赞同，他认为李维可能把戏剧和哑剧混淆了——这番指责相当离谱，无异于声称这位历史学家对自己文化中最基本的元素一无所知。另一些人则提出证据表明，演员们只是想保留自己的声音以应对背诵台词的高强度要求，因此将演唱任务交给了奴隶——尽管有人不禁要问，为什么没有人关心奴隶们是否需要保留自己的声音以备后续演出，尤其是在歌唱比背诵要求更高的情况下。难道漏掉的音符比嘶哑的台词更容易被观众接受吗？即使关于嗓音紧张的解释属实，让奴隶来负责唱歌的决定也颇具启发性。这显然是公开表演中较不体面的方面，因此最适合由奴隶来做^。4

How shameful was music-making during this period? The Roman historian Livy tells us that early actors in Roman theater did not sing their own songs—they merely made onstage gestures while others did the actual vocal work. Many scholars have dismissed this account as implausible. “It is difficult to believe that tragedy and comedy were performed this way,” writes classicist H. D. Jocelyn. Scholar Sander Goldberg agrees, suggesting that Livy may have confused drama with pantomime—quite an extraordinary accusation, akin to claiming that the historian was unaware of the most basic elements of his own culture. Others have presented evidence that actors merely wanted to save their voices for the strenuous demands of reciting the dialogue, and thus assigned the singing to a slave—although one wonders why no concern was ever expressed over the slaves preserving their voices for subsequent performances, especially given the greater demands of singing over recitation. Were missed vocal notes more acceptable to audiences than hoarse spoken lines? Even if the explanation of the strained voice is true, the decision to let a slave handle the singing is revealing. This was clearly the less dignified aspect of the public performance, and thus a task best suited for a slave.⁴

南北战争前美国南方的种植园主毫不怀疑李维的说法。这个社会对其奴隶黑人工人的歌声着迷，只有远道而来的旅行者才会对非洲歌手在精英社交聚会上出现的频率感到困惑。在这个社会里，奴隶在音乐表演中被赋予的角色被视为理所当然。上一章旨在区分受认可的歌曲和粗俗歌曲，这一区别也一直反映在音乐家之间的类似区别中。有些歌曲根本无法被有尊严地演奏。无论是在伊斯兰世界的阿巴斯王朝早期，还是在罗马帝国的鼎盛时期，或是19世纪大部分时间的美国南部腹地，或是奴隶制时期的巴西，情况都一样。事实上，在巴西，卡波耶拉表演将非裔巴西人的音乐和舞蹈与杂技和武术元素相结合，却遭到如此不信任，以至于在奴隶制废除很久之后，它们仍然是非法的——这一禁令一直持续到20世纪20年代。简而言之，歌曲面临的种姓制度与针对人类的种姓制度一样严峻。2500多年来，种姓制度一直是我们音乐生活中根深蒂固的一部分。唉，统治阶级反复认识到，通常是震惊和沮丧地认识到，被禁或被鄙视的歌曲往往是人们最想听到的。

A plantation owner from the Antebellum South in the United States would have had no trouble believing Livy’s claim. This society was fascinated with the songs of its enslaved black workers, and only travelers from afar were puzzled by how frequently African performers were featured at elite social gatherings. Within this society, the assigned role of the slave populace in musical performances was merely taken for granted. The breach in music described in the previous chapter, that aimed to divide sanctioned songs from vulgar ones, has always been mirrored in a similar distinction between musicians. Some songs simply could not be performed with dignity. That would have been just as true during the early Abbasid era in the Islamic world as during the peak period of the Roman Empire, or in the Deep South during most of the nineteenth century, or Brazil during its period of slave labor. In fact, the capoeira performances in Brazil, which combine Afro-Brazilian music and dance with elements of acrobatics and martial arts, were viewed with such distrust that they remained illegal long after slavery was abolished—a prohibition that continued until the 1920s. Put simply, songs face a caste system just as severe as those applied to people. That has been an ingrained part of our musical lives for more than 2,500 years. Alas, what the ruling class has learned repeatedly, typically with shock and dismay, is that the forbidden or despised songs are often the ones people most want to hear.

这告诉我们该如何理解那件关于罗马大火时皇帝尼禄拉琴的著名轶事。值得强调的是，这起事件的丑闻并非火灾——一种常常超出人类控制的力量——而是音乐。关于他缺乏男子气概的指控再次被提及。罗马历史学家狄奥·卡西乌斯将以下嘲讽尼禄女性化的话归咎于凯尔特女王布狄卡：“他虽然名义上是‘男人’，但实际上是个女人，证据就是他唱歌、弹奏里拉琴，还装扮自己。” ⁵

This tells us how we should understand the famous anecdote about Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned. The scandal here, it’s worth emphasizing, is not the fire—a force often beyond human control—but the music. Again the charge of unmanliness is brought into the mix. Roman historian Dio Cassius attributes to the Celtic queen Boudicca these words ridiculing Nero for his effeminacy: “While he may have the name of ‘man’, he is in fact a woman, and the evidence for this is that he sings and plays the lyre and prettifies himself.”⁵

尼禄在公元64年那场摧毁了罗马城70%建筑的大火中很可能没有拉提琴。虽然提琴在古代并不存在，但它的前身确实存在。基萨拉琴的可能性更大——因此，如果我们说皇帝在大火中弹奏了一把吉他，那对穿着托加长袍的人群来说，就像是“水上烟雾”的场景，那么我们的说法就更有说服力了。塔西佗，我们了解这个故事的最佳来源，并没有提到任何乐器；他声称尼禄当时正在歌唱特洛伊的毁灭，但他将此归为谣言，而非确凿的事实。然而，这里的细节远不如一个更大的事实重要，那就是，罗马历史上最著名的音乐表演帝国曾是流言蜚语和嘲笑的焦点，既象征着专制的冷酷无情，也象征着音乐创作的普遍耻辱。在英语中，我们也保留了这种态度——即使在今天，“ fiddling” （小提琴）一词仍然带有浪费时间、从事毫无意义的追求而忽略更紧迫事务的含义。

Nero probably didn’t play the fiddle during the great fire of AD 64, which destroyed 70 percent of the city of Rome. The fiddle didn’t exist in antiquity, although its predecessors did. The kithara is a far more likely candidate—so we would be on a firmer footing if we said the emperor jammed on a guitar during the conflagration, a kind of “Smoke on the Water” moment for the toga crowd. Tacitus, our best source for this story, doesn’t mention any instrument; he relates that Nero was singing about the destruction of Troy, but labels this as a rumor, not substantiated fact. Yet the specifics here are less important than the larger truth, namely, that the most famous musical performance in the history of the Roman Empire was a focal point of scurrilous hearsay and derision, served up as an emblem of both authoritarian callousness and the general shame of music-making. Here, too, we have preserved this attitude in the English language—even today, the term fiddling carries a meaning of wasting time, of engaging in worthless pursuits while ignoring more pressing matters.

如果罗马人羞于接受大众娱乐中缺乏男子气概的音乐，他们便试图通过将充满男子气概的战争音乐制度化来弥补。他们并非军乐的发明者，尽管他们对军乐有着极大的热情，既出于仪式目的，也出于实用目的。更早之前，在埃及人中，我们发现了一种延续数千年的模式：鼓声用于鼓舞士气、维持秩序，号角则用于发出信号。希腊人对军乐的理解则更为奇特，他们忽视了鼓——这或许表明他们的文化更注重个人主义而非秩序——而是将合唱团带入战场。古典学家约翰·温克勒甚至认为，一部希腊悲剧中的合唱团是以军事风格为蓝本的，其中可能包括为战斗进行训练的年轻男子，而他们在表演中的动作则模仿了军队整齐的列队行进。这是一个奇怪的概念，并没有被普遍接受，但该理论从本文提供的许多其他例子中获得了可信度，这些例子表明娱乐和屠杀之间存在着隐藏在表面之下的联系^。6

If the Romans were ashamed of the unmanly music of popular entertainments, they attempted to compensate by institutionalizing the manly music of warfare. They did not invent the practice of military music, although they had great zeal for it, both for ritualistic and utilitarian purposes. Far earlier, among the Egyptians, we find a schema that would last for thousands of years, with drums used to enliven and impose order on the soldiers, and horns employed for signaling. The Greeks had odder ideas about military music, ignoring the drum—perhaps a sign of a culture more devoted to individualism than to orderliness—and instead bringing choral singers into battle. Classicist John Winkler has even suggested that the chorus in a Greek tragedy was modeled on military lines, perhaps involving young men training for battle, and that their movements in performance imitated the orderly procession of troops. It’s a peculiar notion, and not universally accepted, but the theory gains credence from the many other examples, presented in these pages, of hidden-beneath-the-surface linkages between entertainment and carnage.⁶

无论如何，这些动作，无论是在舞台上还是战场上，可能都与我们通常认为的行军部队的动作不同。雅典士兵行军时，至少不是按照现代军队的常规方式，尽管斯巴达人可能有。后者的动作与奥洛斯（aulos）的声音相一致——奥洛斯在其他场合因其激起的强烈情感而遭人鄙视，但在战场上，激情的情感却有其价值。克里特人也使用里拉琴来演奏。伊特鲁里亚人是罗马的更接近的榜样，他们被古人公认为军用大号的发明者——大号是一种长管，末端呈钟形，外观与我们现代的大号截然不同，更像小号——这是他们军用乐器的重要组成部分。军械库。据说，这种号角不仅能发出信号，还能震慑敌人。这种乐器与伊特鲁里亚海盗袭击密切相关，以至于古代文献中出现了“强盗号手”一词。事实上，伊特鲁里亚人生活中几乎所有暴力或武力行为都有音乐伴奏：狩猎、打斗、拳击，甚至惩罚奴隶。伊特鲁里亚人精湛的冶金术使他们能够为每一项功能发明合适的乐器，这让我们得出一个令人不安的结论：号角的进步源于杀戮的需要。从这些不同的来源中，罗马人构建了他们自己独特而“男子气概”的军乐体系，这种军乐伴随着士兵生活的方方面面，从战前的训练到胜利后的辉煌凯旋。

In any event, these motions, whether on stage or the battlefield, probably did not resemble the movements we typically associate with marching troops. Athenian soldiers did not march, at least not in the conventional manner of modern armies, although the Spartans may have. The latter aligned their movements to the sound of the aulos—despised in other settings for the strong emotions it evoked, but passionate feelings have their value on the battlefield. The Cretans used the lyre for the same purpose. The Etruscans, a closer role model for Rome, were acknowledged among the ancients as inventors of the military tuba—a long tube ending in a bell shape, very different in appearance from our modern tuba and more akin to a trumpet—which was a key part of their arsenal. We are told that this horn not only issued signals, but also instilled fear in adversaries. The instrument was so closely associated with Etruscan pirate raids that the term “robber-trumpeters” appears in ancient texts. In fact, almost every violent or forceful act in Etruscan life had its musical accompaniment: hunting, fighting, boxing, even punishing slaves. The skills of the Etruscans in metallurgy enabled them to invent proper instruments for each of these functions, leading us to the disturbing conclusion that advances in horns were due to the need to shed blood. From these varied sources, the Romans constructed their own distinctive and ‘manly’ approach to military music, which accompanied every aspect of a soldier’s life, from training before battle to the glorious triumph after victory.

罗马人也忽视了军乐中的鼓，但他们广泛使用管乐器。例如，他们借用了伊特鲁里亚的长号（tuba），用它来指挥前进和后退。角号（cornu）是一种G形的长号，用于在战斗中传达将军的命令，或伴奏插旗仪式。这是一种巨大的号角——在庞贝古城出土的完整号角长度超过十英尺。类似但C形的布奇纳（buccina）还有其他用途：它可以宣布夜间值班、用餐和起床时间，或用于庄严地处决士兵。每种乐器的演奏者都有其特殊的名字、编号和在战斗中被指定的位置。音乐本身如同指挥官的命令一样具有权威性，必须毫不犹豫地服从。在一个担心音乐创作堕落、女性化的社会里，这些旋律保留了权威，并要求受到尊重。

The Romans also ignored the drum in military music, but they made extensive use of wind instruments. They borrowed the Etruscan tuba, for instance, and used it to order advances and retreats. The cornu, a long G-shaped horn, was blown to transmit the general’s orders in the midst of battle, or to accompany the planting of colors. This was a huge horn—a complete instrument recovered in Pompeii is more than ten feet in length. The similar but C-shaped buccina had other uses: it might announce the night watch, meals, and wake-up times, or solemnize the execution of a soldier. The players of each type of instrument had their special names, set numbers, and assigned locations in the midst of battle. The music itself was as definitive as a commander’s orders, and had to be obeyed without hesitation. In a society that worried about degraded, effeminate music-making, these were melodies that retained authority and demanded respect.

然而，所有的盛况和仪式都无法掩盖罗马官方音乐往往空洞无物的事实。回想一下，这个社会吸收了希腊歌曲中最有力的形式——史诗和抒情诗——并去除了它们的音乐，即使这些文学形式仍然保留着吟游诗人吟唱的假象。在伟大的罗马史诗《埃涅阿斯纪》的开篇，维吉尔宣称他歌颂的是战争和战士——从罗马当局的角度来看，这两者都是歌曲的恰当主题——但这一切都是虚伪的，故作姿态。在凯撒奥古斯都时代，史诗诗人不再吟唱他们的作品。当一首庄严的过去的歌曲被保留下来时，它往往近乎演戏。萨利安赞美诗被罗马人视为他们最古老的歌曲之一，演唱起来非常庄严，但歌词却非常晦涩，到公元1 世纪，就连博学的西塞罗也无法听懂整首圣歌。阿尔瓦尔兄弟会的歌曲也是如此，这是一个祭司组织，其历史可以追溯到罗马的起源，但其仪式和音乐对奥古斯都时代的罗马人来说基本上是难以理解的。这就好比现代的狂欢者唱着“友谊地久天长”来迎接新年，却不清楚这些歌词的含义。罗马人崇敬他们无法理解的事物——以至于罗马元老院甚至下令将凯撒·奥古斯都的名字写入萨利安圣歌的歌词中。即使歌词令人费解，他们仍然相信这首音乐的神奇功效，并希望在他们忘记这首歌的最初目的之后，它仪式性的保护作用能够延续下去。

Yet all the pomp and ritual could not hide the fact that official Roman music was often hollow at the core. Recall that this society had taken the most powerful forms of Greek song—the epic and lyric—and removed their music, even as these literary forms retained a pretense that a bard was singing. In the opening line of the great Roman epic the Aeneid, Virgil declares that he sings of war and the man of battle—two appropriate subjects for song, from the standpoint of Roman authorities—but this was all sham and posturing. Epic poets no longer sang their works in the age of Caesar Augustus. When a dignified song from the past was retained, it often bordered on play-acting. The Salian Hymn, respected by the Romans as one of their most venerable songs, was performed with great dignity, but the words were so obscure that, by the first century AD, even learned Cicero was unable to comprehend the entire chant. The same was true of the songs of the Arval brethren, a priesthood whose history was traced back to the origins of Rome, but whose rituals and music were largely incomprehensible to the Romans of the Augustan Age. Consider it the equivalent of modern revelers singing “Auld Lang Syne” to hail in a new year, yet without any clear notion what those words mean. The Romans revered what they could not understand—so much so that the name of Caesar Augustus was inserted into the words of the Salian Hymn by decree of the Roman Senate. They still believed in the magical efficacy of the music, even if the words were baffling, and they wanted its ritualistic protection to continue long after they had forgotten the song’s original purpose.

这的确是古老的魔法。最近在意大利考古遗址中发现了类似萨利安盾牌的文物，这些文物可以追溯到公元前九世纪或十世纪，表明这种仪式比罗马本身还要古老。萨利安祭司会把这些盾牌当作打击乐器，在带有浓厚军事色彩的仪式中敲击它们。表演者身着武士装，手持利剑，他们的舞蹈以三拍节奏进行，这种节奏被称为“三拍舞” （tripudium），可以描述为一种神圣的跳跃。“三拍舞”一词最终被拉丁作家用来指代各种与战斗、欢欣或其他需要付出巨大努力的活动相关的仪式化动作。塞内加将“三拍舞”称为“阳刚之舞”——“这是一种男子气概的舞蹈，是古代男子在娱乐和节日期间跳舞的常规做法，即使被自己的敌人注视，他们也不会冒任何失去尊严的风险。”佩特罗尼乌斯在他的《萨蒂利孔》中描述了四个奴隶在揭开锅盖之前跳了一段三重舞，这些高尚的联想更增添了荒谬感。这段舞蹈可能流传到了^{中世纪时期，或者至少在教会当局}攻击异教传统时，人们提到过这个词。据说直到13世纪，圣方济各还曾与一群“三重唱”（tripudianti）的歌舞表演。7

This was old magic indeed. Recent excavations of objects resembling Salian shields at Italian archaeological sites dating back to the ninth or tenth century BC suggest that the ritual was far older than Rome itself. The Salian priesthood would employ these shields as percussion instruments, clanging on them as part of a ceremony with marked military overtones. The performers were dressed as warriors, carrying swords, and their dance to a three-beat rhythm, the tripudium, could be described as a kind of holy leaping. The word would eventually get applied by Latin writers to a wide range of ritualized movements related to combat, exultation, or other activities requiring great effort. Seneca refers to the tripudium as a virile dance—“the manly style that was the normal practice of those men of old when they used to dance in times of entertainment and festivals without incurring any risk of losing dignity, even if they were being watched by their own enemies.” When Petronius, in his Satyricon, describes four slaves dancing a tripudium before removing the lid from a cooking pot, the absurdity is enhanced by these nobler associations. The dance may have survived into the Middle Ages, or at least was referred to when church authorities attacked pagan traditions. As late as the thirteenth century, St. Francis was said to have performed songs and dances with groups of tripudianti.⁷

但那些追寻罗马世界真正流行音乐的人，必须将目光投向那些象征男子气概的仪式和令人敬畏的军号声之外。大众娱乐的中心是遍布帝国各地的剧院，它们对音乐文化的影响比士兵或官员的影响更为深远。仅在意大利和西西里岛，我们就知道至少有175个剧院，从里斯本到卡帕多西亚的各省，剧院的数量甚至更多。仅在北非的一个省——非洲总督区（Africa Proconsularis）——就已发现超过50个剧院——该地区包括今突尼斯、阿尔及利亚和利比亚的部分地区。

But those seeking the real popular music of the Roman world must look beyond sanctioned rituals of manliness and formidable displays of military horns. The centers of mass entertainment were the theaters, spread out all over the empire, and these left behind a more lasting impact on musical culture than did soldiers or officials. In Italy and Sicily alone, we know of at least 175 theaters, and even more in the provinces from Lisbon to Cappadocia. More than 50 theaters have been identified in just a single North African province, Africa Proconsularis—a territory that included parts of present-day Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya.

那么，观众在这些剧院里期待什么样的音乐娱乐呢？“如果一位朋友邀请你去罗马帝国时期的剧院观看一位著名明星的表演，你几乎肯定对会看到什么样的表演毫不怀疑，”学者约翰·乔里解释道。“这不会是喜剧或悲剧，而是舞蹈表演，而表演者将是哑剧演员。”在这样的场景中，一位戴着面具的舞者会在音乐伴奏下，通过手势、动作和运动表演来演绎一个故事。然而，这些舞蹈并不局限于剧院，我们听说它们在私人住宅甚至街头举行。在这一类型充满争议的历史中，罗马元老院曾被禁止前往哑剧演员的住所，骑士也被禁止参加他们的游行——如果这些聚会仅仅是为大众提供的轻松娱乐，那么这些禁令几乎没有必要。同样，精英阶层渴望乌合之众的音乐，尽管这种依恋让他们蒙羞^。8

And what kind of musical entertainment did audiences expect at these theaters? “If a friend invited you to visit a Roman theater in the imperial period to see a well-known star perform you would have little doubt about the sort of performance you would see,” explains scholar John Jory. “It would not be a comedy or a tragedy but a dance performance and the artist would be a pantomime.” In these settings, a masked dancer would enact a story through gestures, movements, and athletic displays to a musical accompaniment. These dances, however, weren’t restricted to theaters, and we hear of them taking place in private homes and even on the street. At one point in the controversial history of this genre, Roman senators were forbidden to go to the houses of pantomimes, and knights prohibited from participating in their processions—injunctions hardly necessary if these gatherings were simply a matter of light entertainment for the masses. Here again, elites crave the music of the rabble, although they court shame by this very attachment.⁸

音乐史上一个奇怪却反复出现的现象是，对公众影响最广泛的表演往往是后世记载最少的表演。学者们对哑剧的关注远不及对古代悲剧和喜剧的关注。或许，他们之所以如此关注，是因为哑剧的现存信息并不完整。没有一份剧本是清晰真实的。至今仍存。即使是目击者的描述也留下了许多未解之谜，我们所知的信息有时甚至相互矛盾。例如，我们确信哑剧是“柔弱无力、软弱无能”的，但相关记载也强调了表演者的运动天赋，这体现在跳跃、旋转、弯曲和无穷的活力上。此外，罗马人似乎担心许多类型的音乐表演（他们从希腊人那里继承下来的）会沾染女性的柔弱，或许只是将观众所遭受的道德打击投射到表演者身上^。9

In a strange but recurring phenomenon in music history, the performances that had the most widespread impact on the public are often those least well documented by posterity. Scholars have devoted far less attention to pantomime than to ancient tragedy and comedy. They are perhaps excused by the sketchy surviving information about pantomime. Not a single libretto of clear authenticity has survived. Even descriptions from eyewitnesses leave many questions unanswered, and what we are told is sometimes contradictory. For example, we are assured that pantomimes were “effete, limp and feckless,” but accounts also emphasize the athleticism of the performers, demonstrated by leaps, spins, bends, and boundless energy. Then again, the Romans seemed to fear the taint of feminine weakness in many types of musical performance, their inheritance from the Greeks, and may have simply been projecting onto the entertainer the dreaded moral impact on the spectators.⁹

在这些活动中，大批人群可能会变得难以控制。公元14年和15年的“哑剧暴乱”想必相当混乱——至少有六位历史学家提到了这些事件。这就像古代的阿尔塔蒙特时刻，娱乐活动激起的强烈情绪最终变得丑陋。一位明星演员因片酬纠纷被取消演出，或许是引发骚乱的导火索，但诸多不满情绪也可能导致了这场骚乱。相关记载让我们确信哑剧观众当时的狂热。公元23年，提比略甚至放逐了哑剧及其最狂热的支持者，声称他们“经常煽动反抗国家，并在私人住宅中放荡”。这听起来几乎与20世纪60年代评论家对嬉皮士及其音乐的评价如出一辙。但在古代，就像在越南战争时期一样，此类措施几乎没有产生长期影响。哑剧最终回归罗马，其名声传遍整个帝国。哑剧一直活跃于大众娱乐之中，直到公元六世纪末^。10

Large crowds could be unruly at these events. The “pantomime riots” of AD 14 and 15 must have been tumultuous—no fewer than six historians refer to the incidents. It was a kind of Altamont moment in antiquity, when the powerful feelings aroused by entertainment turned ugly. The canceled appearance of a star performer in a dispute over pay may have instigated the outburst, but many causes of discontent probably contributed to the unrest. Accounts leave us in little doubt about the frenzy of pantomime attendees. In AD 23, Tiberius even banished the pantomimes and their fiercest advocates, claiming they were “frequently the fomenters of sedition against the state and of debauchery in private houses.” It almost sounds like what critics said about hippies and their music back in the 1960s. But in ancient times as in the Vietnam era, such measures had little long-term impact. The pantomimes eventually returned to Rome, and their fame spread throughout the empire. They would continue to figure in popular entertainment until the end of the sixth century.¹⁰

我们只能推测这些表演的伴奏音乐，但现存的记载中反复提到了打击乐器的使用。哑剧中最具特色的乐器是斯卡贝伦（scabellum），这是一种由乐师用脚踩动的木制拍板，为舞蹈提供节拍器般的节奏。但我们听说表演中还会出现许多其他打击乐器，包括鼓、钹和响板。管乐器和弦乐器也被提及，包括备受鄙视的奥洛斯（aulos）。但值得注意的是，古人经常使用这种所谓的笛子来强调节奏，无论是与划船者的节奏同步，还是与舞者的舞步同步。因此，我们或许应该将这些哑剧表演的音乐主要视为激情和强度的源泉——或许能够产生我们这个时代的神经科学家所研究的那种由节奏驱动的同步，即脑电波与外部节奏的协调——而不仅仅是背景伴奏。在这令人着迷的节奏下，合唱团会唱出剧本，但故事本身却取材于耳熟能详的神话传说。观众的注意力并非集中在展开的情节上，而是集中在其艺术性和情感饱满的表演上。

We can merely speculate on the sound of the music that accompanied these performances, but the use of percussion instruments is repeatedly mentioned in surviving accounts. The most characteristic instrument in pantomime was the scabellum, a wooden clapper played by the musician’s foot that provided a metronomic pulse to the dance. But we hear of a range of other percussion instruments that might show up in a performance, including drums, cymbals, and castanets. Wind and string instruments are also mentioned, including the much-despised aulos. But it’s worth noting that the ancients frequently employed this so-called flute to accentuate the beat, whether they were synchronizing the rhythm of rowers or the steps of dancers. So we should perhaps consider the music of these pantomime performances primarily as a source of passion and intensity—probably producing the kind of rhythm-driven entrainment, or alignment of brain waves with external rhythms, studied by neuroscientists in our own day—rather than as mere background accompaniment. Against this mesmerizing beat, the chorus would sing the libretto, but the story would have been a familiar one drawn from well-known myths and legends. The audience’s focus was less on the unfolding plot than on its artistic—and emotionally charged—enactment.

这些活动的参与者一定渴望喧闹。记载经常强调哑剧的响度，而我们从现场音乐的亲身体验中知道，其声音的力量与实际演奏的音符一样具有影响力。然而，哑剧观众对分贝的热情，最明显体现在提到使用水风琴（或称“ hydraulis”）的记载中。用维吉尔的话来说，这是一项技术创新，它利用“水和空气的力量，被强力搅动，像喇叭一样发出悠长而洪亮的音符”。值得注意的是，这种乐器也用于角斗士的战斗。无论表演内容是血腥还是舞蹈，它可能都服务于同一个目的：用其巨大的声音为观众和参与者带来震撼^。11

Participants at these events must have craved the noise. Accounts frequently stress the loudness of the pantomime, and we know from our own experiences with live music how the power of its sound can have as much impact as the actual notes played. The zeal for decibels among pantomime attendees, however, is made most clear by accounts mentioning the use of the water organ (or hydraulis), a technical innovation that, in the words of Virgil, drew on the power of “water and of air, which is forcibly agitated, and like a trumpet it emits long, booming notes.” This instrument, it’s worth noting, also accompanied gladiator fights. Whether bloodshed or dance was on the bill, it probably served the same purpose: to provide a visceral boost to both spectators and participants by its very loud sounds.¹¹

鉴于此，我们还能惊讶于罗马精英阶层如此普遍地认为音乐是耻辱，以至于他们心甘情愿地让外来者和奴隶主宰这个领域吗？用古典学家约翰·兰德尔斯的话来说，罗马人逐渐接受了“外国人（尤其是希腊人）‘在这方面比我们强’的观点。为了弥补这种自卑感，他们珍视外国音乐家都女性化、‘矫揉造作’、普遍声名狼藉的想法。” ¹²

Given all this, can we be surprised that the shame of music so pervaded the attitudes of Roman elites that they willingly allowed outsiders and slaves to dominate this field? In the words of the classicist John Landels, the Romans came to accept that “foreigners (especially Greeks) were ‘better at that sort of thing than we are’. By way of compensation for this admission of inferiority, they cherished the thought that foreign musicians were all effeminate, ‘camp’ and generally disreputable.”¹²

这或许是我们从罗马帝国继承下来的最显著的音乐遗产——与其说是理论或技巧上的显著创新，不如说是心理层面的。在某种程度上，我们继承了这种对音乐情感力量的羞愧感。我在撰写关于情歌史的著作时，亲身体验了这种态度。我首先注意到的是，学者们对这一主题的写作出奇地不愿。迄今为止，还没有关于情歌的完整调查出版——考虑到爱情在过去至少一千年里一直是歌曲中最热门的主题，这真是一个令人震惊的遗漏。我开始思考评论家戴夫·希基（Dave Hickey）悬而未决的问题：“我想知道，为什么90%的流行歌曲都是情歌，而90%的摇滚乐评论却只针对剩下的10%。” 我最终发现，这种现象并不局限于摇滚乐创作，而是音乐史领域更广泛的一个缩影。当我与其他学者讨论我的研究时，我能察觉到他们一谈到情歌就感到一种近乎尴尬的不安。他们不会像罗马人那样使用那些贬低女性、下流的词语——但他们对这种音乐的本能反应与塞涅卡或尤维纳尔的并无太大区别。这首感伤的情歌不知何故显得不体面，并带有羞耻感^。13

This may be our most noticeable musical legacy from the Roman Empire—a psychological one, rather than any marked innovations in theory or technique. We have inherited, to some degree, this sense of embarrassment over the emotional power of music. I encountered such attitudes firsthand while researching my book on the history of the love song. My first indicator was the surprising reluctance of scholars to write about the subject. No complete survey of the love song had ever been published—a remarkable omission given the fact that love has been the most popular topic of songs for at least the past one thousand years. I began mulling over critic Dave Hickey’s unanswered question: “I wondered why ninety percent of the pop songs ever written were love songs, while ninety percent of rock criticism was written about the other ten percent.” I eventually discovered that this phenomenon wasn’t restricted to rock writing, but was symptomatic of the broader field of music history. When I discussed my research with other scholars, I could detect an uneasiness bordering on embarrassment when I started to talk to them about love songs. They wouldn’t have used the same words as the Romans—dismissing them as effeminate and debased—but their visceral reaction to this music wasn’t so different from Seneca’s or Juvenal’s. The sentimental love song was somehow undignified and associated with shame.¹³

在这里，我们再次需要参考主流哲学学说，才能理解扭曲音乐文化的意识形态力量。在古罗马的案例中，我们发现伦理和政治考量再次侵入了美学。罗马帝国时期最强大的哲学是斯多葛主义。事实上，在基督教传播之前，斯多葛主义是欧洲人心中最受尊崇、最务实的世界观。它的教义建立在一个坚实的基础之上：即认识到我们越是限制自己的情绪和欲望，就越不容易在生活中感到沮丧。如果悲伤源于得不到我们想要的东西，那么解决办法就是停止渴望。这或许是一个令人痛苦的建议，但其逻辑却不容置疑。

Here again, we need to consult the dominant philosophical doctrines in order to grasp the ideological forces that distorted musical culture. And in the case of ancient Rome, we find ethical and political considerations again intruding on aesthetics. The most powerful philosophy in Roman imperial times was stoicism. In fact, before the spread of Christianity, stoicism was the most revered and practical worldview available to the European mind. Its teachings rested on a bedrock foundation: namely, the realization that the more we limit our emotions and desires, the less likely we are to be frustrated in life. If sorrow arises from not getting what we want, the solution is to stop wanting. That may be painful advice, but its logic is incontestable.

这种对“情感”的敌视，为我们理解塞涅卡那句著名的贬低抒情诗时所持的嘲讽态度提供了背景：“西塞罗宣称，即使他的寿命加倍，他也无暇阅读抒情诗人的作品。” 西塞罗的这番话并非出于文学上的评判，而是一种道德上的谴责。“抒情诗人显然是轻浮的，”塞涅卡继续解释道。到了这个阶段，抒情诗的地位已然下降，其早期的歌曲根源几乎已被遗忘。它仍然保留着情感表达渠道的作用，但也带来了危险——不仅仅是社会或道德层面的危险。罗马人认为，抒情诗甚至可能让人生病。在医学史上最奇特的篇章之一中，古人发明了一种名为“ leptosune”（瘦弱症）的疾病，它体现了人体在文学和音乐文化方面的不足。瘦弱症患者成了喜剧中的常见角色，并成为二战前好莱坞电影中“娘娘腔”角色的先驱^。14

This antagonism to ‘feelings’ gives us the context to understand the derisive attitude toward the lyric in a famous putdown shared by Seneca: “Cicero declared that if the number of his days were doubled, he should not have time to read the lyric poets.” This isn’t a literary judgment on Cicero’s part, but a moral condemnation. “The lyric poets are avowedly frivolous,” Seneca goes on to explain. The lyric was degraded by this stage, its early roots in song all but forgotten. It still retained its role as a channel for emotional expression, but this brought with it dangers—and not just social or moral ones. You could even get physically sick, the Romans believed, from the lyric. In one of the strangest chapters in medical history, the ancients invented a disease, leptosune, that manifested the weakness of the literary and musical culture in the human body. The leptoi became stock figures in comedy—and served as a forerunner of the ‘sissy’ in pre–World War II Hollywood films.¹⁴

在对罗马世界的考察中，我们惊讶地发现音乐创新如此之少。罗马音乐大多是借用或改编的，主要来自希腊，但也有一些来自其他被征服的领土。异域习俗对罗马人的吸引力或许在所谓的神秘教派的兴起中体现得最为明显，神秘教派是少数几个古老仪式仍然激发信徒热情的领域之一。虽然我们对仪式的流程或所涉及的音乐细节知之甚少，但显然参与者寻求的不仅仅是枯燥的教条和仪式。最受青睐的信徒甚至可能获得狂喜体验或获得某种改变的意识形式，尤其是在合适的音乐伴奏下。但为了获得这些体验，罗马人渴望异域风情。这些教派成员与其说信仰本土神祇，不如说信仰外来的神祇：来自波斯的密特拉、来自埃及的伊西斯、来自弗里吉亚的库柏勒，或来自色雷斯的萨巴齐奥斯。然而，文化精英们也同样蔑视大众的激情实践。音乐学家阿里斯蒂德斯·昆体良在公元三世纪的著作中，将这些邪教视为“受教育程度较低者”的素材，他们希望通过旋律和舞蹈来缓解自己的“抑郁焦虑”。在一个自我形象过于依赖礼仪、纪律和男子气概的社会中，即使是精神上的超越——以及它的音乐来源——也会被怀疑^。15

It’s striking how little musical innovation we encounter in this survey of the Roman world. So much of Roman music was borrowed or adapted, mostly from Greece, but also from other conquered territories. The allure that foreign practices held for the Romans is probably seen most clearly in the rise of the so-called mystery cults, one of the few areas in which old rituals still inspired zeal among practitioners. Although we know little about the proceedings or the specifics of the music involved, it’s evident that participants sought something more than dry dogma and formalities. The most favored adherents might even be granted an ecstatic experience or access to an altered form of consciousness, especially with the accompaniment of the right kind of music. But for these kinds of experiences, the Romans craved exoticism. The cult members put their faith not so much in homegrown deities as in foreign gods: Mithras from Persia, Isis from Egypt, Cybele from Phrygia, or Sabazios from Thrace. Yet here, as well, the cultural elites scorned the passionate practices of the masses. The musicologist Aristides Quintilianus, writing in the third century AD, dismissed the cults as fodder for “less educated people” who hoped that their “depressive anxiety” could be reduced through melodies and dance. In a society whose self-image relied far too much on decorum, discipline, and manly virtues, even spiritual transcendence—and its musical sources—were viewed with suspicion.¹⁵

这是罗马帝国主义留给我们的鸿沟，其军事胜利使这些古代征服者为西方音乐文化奠定了基础，尽管他们自己对自己的音乐才能缺乏信心，并且常常感到对其最受欢迎的表现形式感到羞愧。他们从希腊人那里继承了这种在合法音乐和粗俗音乐之间痛苦的分裂，但在罗马的统治下，这种鸿沟越来越大。哑剧的喧闹甚至有时是被禁止的娱乐活动与军事的男子气概的音乐之间的对比再明显不过了。但同样引人注目的是，大众所享受的音乐娱乐与罗马宗教和仪式音乐日益空洞的形式之间的活力差异——其中大部分注定会随着基督教的兴起而消失。最重要的是，我们看到罗马人越来越意识到，最强烈的音乐体验必须从外来者——奴隶或外国人——而不是他们自己的统治阶级中寻求。这些是罗马音乐生活的典型特征，但它们很少出现在现存的古代文献中，这些文献颂扬了罗马精英自我认知的核心——男性音乐形式，并且通常以批评、谴责和讽刺的形式，提供日常生活真实配乐中最诱人的暗示。

This is the divide bequeathed to us by Roman imperialism, whose military successes allowed these ancient conquerors to lay the groundwork for Western music culture, even though they themselves had little confidence in their own musicality, and often felt ashamed over its most popular manifestations. They inherited this painful split between sanctioned and vulgar music from the Greeks, but the chasm grew all the wider under the dominion of Rome. The contrast between the raucous and sometimes prohibited entertainments of the pantomime and the manly music of the military could hardly be more pronounced. But just as striking is the difference in vitality between the musical entertainments enjoyed by the masses and the increasingly hollow formalities of Roman sacred and ritual music—much of it destined to disappear with the rise of Christianity. Above all, we witness the growing realization among the Romans that the most intense musical experiences must be sought from outsiders—slaves or foreigners—rather than from their own ruling class. These are the defining characteristics of Roman musical life, yet they rarely rise to the surface of the surviving texts from antiquity, which celebrate the manly forms of music that were central to how Roman elites saw themselves, and provide only the most tantalizing hints of the real soundtrack of everyday life, usually in the form of critique, denunciation, and satire.

我们在此从微观角度看到，这段颠覆性的音乐史与主流叙事有多么不同。罗马文化的主流叙事始于对史诗诗人维吉尔和抒情诗人贺拉斯的推崇，但对我们来说，这些人是奇特而令人不安的创新者，尽管他们作为作家拥有诸多可论证的功绩，却割断了音乐与文本之间的重要联系。他们与皇帝的密切关系，在其他人看来是对其功绩的认可，但对我们来说，却象征着文化日益分化，政治权力日益决定着什么值得赞扬和保留，或者反过来，什么值得批判和禁止。

We see here, in microcosm, how different this subversive history of music is from mainstream accounts. Prevailing narratives of Roman culture start by enshrining Virgil, the epic poet, and Horace, the lyric poet, but for us these are peculiar, troubling innovators who, for all their demonstrable merits as authors, severed the vital ties between music and text. Their close affiliation to the emperor, viewed by others as validation of their merit, is for us an emblem of the growing stratification of a culture in which political power increasingly determined what was praised and preserved—or, conversely, panned and prohibited.

我们必须超越现存文本，努力理解为什么塞涅卡的许多悲剧得以流传后世，而一些大众娱乐类型——它们在日常生活中扮演着比如今被奉为圭臬的古代经典作品更重要的角色——却仅仅为人所知。我们必须致力于从官方认可的音乐中寻找真正的音乐，并且应该对那些引发争议和反对的歌曲保持好奇心，因为我们知道这些歌曲是社会变革中反复出现的创新爆发点和催化剂。最后，我们需要在纠正这些扭曲之后，看到一个完全不同的音乐文化，它以羞耻为基础，却又渴望歌曲带来的狂喜释放。有了这种对古代音乐的更广阔的视角，我们就能构建一部更精准（或许不那么庄重）的音乐史——一部不仅讲述罗马，也讲述后来社会（包括我们自己的社会）重要真相的音乐史。

We must look beyond the surviving texts and strive to comprehend why, for example, so many tragedies by Seneca were handed down to posterity, while entire genres of mass entertainment, genres that played a much larger role in day-to-day life than the now enshrined classics of ancient times, are known to us merely by hearsay. We must aim to recover the real music from the official and sanctioned music, and should be most curious about the songs that excited controversy and opposition, knowing that these are recurring flashpoints for innovation and catalysts for change in societies. And finally, we need to see, after correcting for these distortions, an entirely different music culture, shame-based yet craving the ecstatic release provided only by song. With this broader view of ancient music, we can construct a more accurate, if perhaps less dignified, music history—one that tells us important truths not just about Rome, but also about later societies, our own not excluded.

10

10

魔鬼之歌

The Devil’s Songs

我们尚未遇到“罪孽”的概念，但现在这种情况将会改变。古人对音乐有很多担忧，但这些担忧往往集中在与其对性格和社会影响相关的实际问题上。神灵可能对音乐娱乐有强烈的意见，这种想法很少进入他们的思考范围。当然，神灵有他们自己的音乐，这些音乐植根于仪式之中，需要以适当的礼仪来处理，但文化精英们对世俗音乐频繁提出的反对意见，关注的是当下，而不是来世。宙斯真的不在乎你在闲暇时听什么歌。

We haven’t encountered the concept of sin yet, but that will now change. The ancients had many worries about music, but these tended to focus on practical matters relating to its impact on character and society. The notion that the gods might have strong opinions on musical entertainment rarely entered into their thinking. The deities, of course, had their own music, embedded in ritual observances, and this needed to be handled with proper decorum, but the objections to secular music so frequently raised by cultural elites focused on the here-and-now, not the hereafter. Zeus really didn’t care what songs you heard in your spare time.

这种务实的音乐观，无需任何来世或罪孽的概念来对演奏风格施加最严格的限制，在希腊罗马的影响范围之外也能找到。事实上，这种观点在中国思想家墨子那篇非同寻常的批判性著作《反乐》中达到了顶峰。墨子与苏格拉底生活在同一时代，他倡导一种简朴克制的哲学。《反乐》是迄今为止流传下来的关于音乐主题最具敌意的宣言，在其后的几个世纪中，很少有人能与其激烈的抗议相提并论。其他理论家区分了可歌可歌和禁歌，并对乐器、调式和风格进行了细致的区分，而墨子却提出了一个笼统的主张：“作乐非礼也！”他不容许任何例外，坚称统治者若想“兴天下之利，除天下之害，则应禁绝乐！”然而，不敬或罪恶的概念从未进入他的思想；他也没有提及任何神圣或世俗的概念。墨子对音乐的反对完全基于实际考虑。他希望将花在音乐上的时间和金钱投入到更有益的项目上^。1

This same practical approach to music, which needed no concept of an afterlife or sin to enforce the most severe strictures on performance styles, can also be found beyond the boundaries of Greco-Roman influence. In fact, it reaches its highest pitch in the extraordinary diatribe Against Music by the Chinese thinker Mozi, who lived around the same time as Socrates and taught a philosophy of austerity and restraint. Against Music is the most hostile manifesto on the subject that has survived from ancient times, and few in the succeeding centuries have even come close to matching its bitter protestations. Where other theoreticians distinguished between permitted and forbidden songs, making fine discriminations among instruments, modes, and styles, Mozi offers a sweeping claim: “Making music is wrong!” He allows for no exceptions, insisting that if rulers want to “promote what is beneficial to the world and eliminate what is harmful, they must prohibit and put a stop to this thing called music!” And yet the concept of impiety or sin never enters into his thinking; nor does he make any references to notions of the sacred or profane. Mozi bases his objection to music entirely on practical concerns. He wants the time and money spent on music directed to more useful projects.¹

他指出，音乐既不能喂饱饥饿的人，也不能给穷人提供衣服。音乐既不能促进社会秩序，也不能减少日常生活中无处不在的混乱。因此，无论高低贵贱、强弱，都必须抵制音乐的诱惑。如果统治者将资源分配给音乐，他们就等于将资源从更紧迫的需求中抽离出来。听音乐的农民会忽视庄稼。关注音乐的妇女会忘记纺织。在一个秩序井然的社会里，这种玩忽职守的行为是不能被允许的。

Music does nothing to feed the hungry or clothe the poor, he points out. Music does not contribute to social order, or reduce the ever-present chaos of day-to-day life. Hence its allure must be resisted by both high and low, the powerful and the weak. If rulers allocate resources to music, they are taking them away from more pressing needs. Farmers who listen to music will neglect the crops. Women who pay attention to music will forget to spin and weave. In a well-ordered society, such dereliction of duty cannot be allowed.

这种立场的严厉程度令人震惊，但其对功利因素的执着与古代普遍存在的音乐观念高度一致。孔子持有截然不同的观点，但也采取了务实务实的态度，强调音乐在教育和礼仪中的核心地位。他深知音乐带来的感官愉悦——一个著名的故事讲述了他因听到“韶”而欣喜若狂，持续了三个月。“韶”是一种由传说中的舜帝（另一位因音乐创新而享有盛誉的强大权威）演奏的哑剧。但这种音乐的吸引力在于它对道德和品格的有益影响。儒家思想最终将歌曲的实用价值置于近乎荒谬的境地。即使是最无害的民歌也被扭曲、剖析和重新诠释，以便从歌词中提取出具有教育意义的元素。好的、秩序井然的歌曲为建立一个良好、有序的社会作出贡献是中国音乐理论的基础。

The severity of this position is striking, but its obsession with utilitarian factors is very much in keeping with prevailing concerns about music in ancient times. Confucius held quite different opinions, but also adopted a hardheaded practical outlook, emphasizing music’s central role in education and ritual. He well understood the sensual pleasure involved—a famous story tells of his rapture, lasting three months, spurred by hearing the shao, a kind of pantomime accompanied by music attributed to the legendary Emperor Shun (another powerful authority who gets credit for musical innovation). But the appeal of this music was linked to its beneficial impact on morals and character. Confucian thinking would eventually focus on the practical value of song almost to an absurd degree. Even the most innocuous folk song was twisted and turned, dissected and reinterpreted, so that teachable moments could be extracted from its lyrics. The notion that good, well-ordered songs contributed to a good, well-ordered society was the foundation of Chinese music theory.

例如，歌曲“In the Bushlands a Creeper Grows”似乎具有明显的含义。

For example, the song “In the Bushlands a Creeper Grows” seems to have an obvious meaning.

有一个如此可爱的男人，

There was a man so lovely,

眉毛清晰圆润。

Clear brow well rounded.

一次偶然的机会我遇见了他，

By chance I came across him,

他让我随心所欲^。2

And he let me have my will.²

在《诗经》的这首歌词中，两个恋人在僻静的地方相遇。真的吗？后来的评论家们展现出巨大的创造力，找到了其他方式来诠释这首简单而感人的歌曲。他们告诉我们，相遇的人不是一对恋人，而是两个值得交往的人，或者，这种关于“偶然相遇”的想法是治理不善的结果——因为“君恩不下于民，民已疲于兵乱”。一旦他们抛弃了歌词的表面含义，他们就可以无止境地进行道德化的解读。在《关雎》（或《鹗鸣》）中，这些词句清楚地提到了单恋的痛苦：

In this lyric from the Shijing, two lovers meet in a secluded spot. Or do they? Later commentators showed enormous ingenuity in finding other ways of interpreting this simple heartfelt song. They tell us that the people meeting are not a romantic couple but two worthy men, or else that this kind of thinking about “random encounters” was a consequence of bad governance—taking place because the “lord’s favor did not flow down to the people [who were] exhausted by military uprisings.” Once they discarded the surface meaning of a lyric, there was no limit to how far they could push the moralizing interpretation. In “Guan Ju” (or “The Ospreys Cry”), the words clearly reference the pain of unrequited love:

他的贵夫人很害羞；

Shy was his noble lady;

他日夜寻找她。

Day and night he sought her.

寻找她却得不到她；

Sought her and could not get her;

他日夜悲痛。

Day and night he grieved.

但这首抒情诗却被解读成政治评论、道德教诲，甚至是对贞洁的颂扬。由于这种解读的自由，我们在抒情诗中寻求的本质特质，即真挚情感的表达和个人自主性，被挪到了幕后，成为阻碍正式文本发挥教化潜力的障碍^。3

But this lyric got turned into a political commentary, a moral lesson, even a celebration of virginity and chastity. As a result of such interpretive liberties, the essential qualities we seek in lyric, namely, the expression of heartfelt feeling and personal agency, were shuffled offstage as inconvenient barriers to the edifying potential of sanctioned texts.³

但值得强调的是，这种权宜之计，尽管对表层意义造成了极大的破坏，仍然是出于实用主义的考虑。相比之下，随着基督教在西方世界的兴起，浪漫主义歌词受到审视，并非为了其寓意，而是为了消除其对信徒灵魂的形而上学威胁。至此，“罪”的概念占据了音乐学的前沿，并持续了一千年甚至更久。音乐的方方面面都受到了审视，以寻找亵渎和不敬的迹象——不仅是歌词，还有乐器、演奏的时间和地点、演奏者的性格和性别，以及旋律和节奏所激起的情感。神父们在讲道坛上怒斥音乐的邪恶，教会会议就音乐的使用发布裁决，神学家们对其本质提出质疑，甚至教皇也时不时地介入，根据情况进行澄清和谴责。所有这些都被极其严肃地处理：毕竟，来世的救赎或诅咒悬而未决。

But it’s worth stressing that this expedient, for all its violence to the surface meanings, was still driven by pragmatic considerations. With the rise of Christianity in the Western world, in contrast, romantic lyrics were scrutinized not for their teachable lessons, but in order to eradicate their metaphysical danger to the souls of believers. At this junction, the notion of sin moved to the forefront of musicology, and would stay there for a thousand years and beyond. Every aspect of music was now scrutinized for signs of profanity and impiety—not just the lyrics, but also the instruments, the time and place of performance, the character and sex of the performer, and the emotions stirred by its melodies and rhythms. Priests fulminated against the evils of music from the pulpit, church councils issued rulings on its use, theologians disputed its nature, even the pope intervened on occasion, clarifying and condemning as the situation warranted. All this was handled with the most deadly seriousness: after all, salvation or damnation in the next life hung in the balance.

这种对音乐批评的大规模干预，最令人吃惊的或许在于，它对信徒的实践却收效甚微。在基督教兴起后的最初一千年里，同样的音乐弊端一次又一次地被揭露，相应的对策也层出不穷，惩罚和苦行也层出不穷，然而这些罪恶的歌曲似乎从未消失。这些不敬虔的言行依然不减，每一代人都保留着前一代人的邪恶歌曲，或者自创新的歌曲。而当世俗音乐最终从这连珠炮似的谩骂和审查中脱颖而出，随着十二世纪游吟诗人的兴起，这种进入精英文化主流的“新”歌曲风格，也暴露出教士们在过去一千年里一直在与之斗争的对肉欲和情欲的痴迷。

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this massive intervention into music criticism was how little impact it had on the practices of believers. During the first one thousand years of Christianity, the same musical abuses were identified again and again, countermeasures were implemented, penalties and penances imposed, yet these sinful songs never seemed to go away. The impieties continued unabated, and each generation held onto the evil songs of the previous one or invented new ones of its own. And when secular music finally emerged from this barrage of invective and censorship, with the rise of the troubadours in the twelfth century, the ‘new’ style of song entering the mainstream of elite culture revealed the same obsession with carnality and lustfulness that the clerics had been battling for the previous millennium.

基督教并非对所有类型的音乐都抱有敌意。从一开始，音乐就融入了信徒的日常生活。在《以弗所书》中，保罗敦促信徒戒除醉酒，转而“用诗章、颂词、灵歌，口唱心和地赞美主”。提到音乐作为醉酒的替代品，表明早期基督徒深谙歌曲的迷幻特性，以及它诱导恍惚和意识状态改变的能力。保罗在《歌罗西书》中再次提到音乐，但这次重点关注的是关于其作为教学工具的运用：“当用各样的智慧，把基督的道理丰丰富富地存在心里，用诗章、颂词、灵歌，彼此教导，互相劝戒，心被感恩地歌颂神。” 但这是两种截然不同的音乐观——歌曲是进入欣快恍惚状态的途径，也是可教时刻的源泉——而且常常相互冲突。由此产生的紧张关系从未得到基督教的充分解决。几个世纪以来，基督教的主要权威人士倾向于教学范式，但普通信徒仍然追求狂喜和超越——尽管它们会带来危险和不可预测性，但任何宗教都无法完全摆脱这些因素^。4

Christianity was not hostile to all kinds of music. From the start, music was integrated into the daily practices of adherents. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul urges believers to abandon drunkenness and instead turn to “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” The mention of music as an alternative to intoxication suggests that the early Christians well understood the ecstatic properties of song, its ability to induce trance and altered states of consciousness. Paul refers to music again in the Epistle to the Colossians, but here focuses on its use as a pedagogical tool: “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.” But these are two very different views of music—songs as a pathway into euphoric trance and as a source of teachable moments—and often in conflict with one another. The resulting tension has never been adequately resolved by Christianity. Over the course of centuries, its leading authorities have tended to favor the pedagogical paradigm, but rank-and-file believers still seek ecstasy and transcendence—and no religion can entirely dispense with those ingredients, despite the danger and unpredictability they bring in their wake.⁴

“后来的基督徒常常将礼拜歌曲指定为祭品，以此将其与异教祭品区分开来，”学者约翰内斯·夸斯滕（Johannes Quasten）解释道。将宗教歌曲视为祭品这一概念在如今的我们看来或许直截了当，毫无争议。即使在基督教兴起两千年后，信徒们也常常将教堂礼拜称为祭祀仪式，而很少思考这一概念的全部含义。然而，在这段颠覆性的历史中，我们如此关注音乐与暴力之间隐秘的联系，我们需要审视祭祀音乐的真实历史，并思考它对过去和现在的启示。在许多方面，这个在音乐学史上鲜少被讨论的话题甚至可以帮助我们理解当代表演的意义，这些表演的基调完全世俗化，没有任何宗教信仰，却吸引了满座的观众前往音乐厅和体育场^。5

“Christians in the succeeding era often designated liturgical song as their sacrifice, thus distinguishing it from pagan sacrifice,” explains scholar Johannes Quasten. This concept of religious songs as sacrifice may seem straightforward and uncontroversial to us nowadays. Even two thousand years after the rise of Christianity, believers often speak of church services as a sacrificial rite without thinking much about the full implications of that concept. Yet in this subversive history, so attuned to the hidden linkages between music and violence, we need to look at the actual history of sacrificial music, and consider what it tells us about both the past and present. In many ways, this seldom discussed topic in the annals of musicology can even help us grasp the significance of contemporary performances, fully secular in tone and without any religious affiliations, that draw capacity crowds to concert halls and stadiums.⁵

这是音乐史上许多人宁愿忽略的一面。例如，普鲁塔克曾提出一个非同寻常的主张：迦太基祭祀中的音乐并非为了庄严仪式，甚至不是为了提升气氛，而是为了掩盖父母将孩子献给巴力·哈蒙时的哭喊和哀号。我们在希伯来圣经中也发现了类似的联系，其中严厉谴责了古代迦南人用儿童献祭的行为。这些祭祀在耶路撒冷的陀斐特举行，陀斐特的名称源于希伯来语“ toph”（意为“鼓”）——这种联系强调了鼓声的突出性，以掩盖屠杀的声音。这就是祭祀音乐的起源令人不安，让人回想起一个暴力时代，当时人们献上血肉，却没有任何舒缓的面包和酒的变体。

This is a side of music history many would prefer to ignore. Plutarch, for example, makes the extraordinary claim that music in the Carthaginian sacrifices was not meant to solemnify the ritual or even to enhance the mood, but to drown out the cries and wails as parents offered up their children to Baal Hammon. We find a similar connection in the Hebrew scriptures, where child sacrifices by the ancient Canaanites are harshly condemned. These sacrifices took place at Topheth in Jerusalem, and that name is derived from the Hebrew word toph, or drum—a linkage emphasizing the prominence of drums to mask the sounds of the slaughter. This is the troubling origin of sacrificial music, harkening back to a violent era when the offering of blood and flesh took place without any soothing transubstantiation into bread and wine.

这与我们现代的音乐实践毫无关联吗？这种野蛮的时代错误与我们更精致、更平和、更崇尚和平的仪式毫无关联？社会理论家雅克·阿塔利（Jacques Attali）在其颇具争议的著作《噪音》（Noise）中提出了相反的观点。事实上，他认为，纵观历史，直至今日，“音乐家都是祭祀过程中不可或缺的一部分，是暴力的传导者。” 乍一看，这种说法似乎有些匪夷所思……但当你仔细思考重金属、朋克摇滚和嘻哈音乐——仅列举其中最显而易见的几种音乐类型——的实际表演仪式时，你就会发现，它们在拥挤的环境中激发着人们最强烈的情感，而酒精或其他麻醉品往往会进一步削弱人们的压抑感。阿塔利在此借鉴了评论家勒内·吉拉尔（René Girard）的理论，后者数十年来一直致力于研究古代祭祀仪式与当代文化制度之间的联系。这类作品几乎完全超出了音乐作家的视野，但对于理解暴力与冲突如何在表演仪式中升华至关重要。换句话说，祭祀仪式至今依然存在，而教堂礼拜仅占其中的一小部分。前往内华达州西北部沙漠举行的年度盛会“火人节”（Burning Man）——就连其名称也透露出与祭祀的联系——来全面体验这一持续传统的一个版本。活动的高潮是安息日举行的大型人偶的火刑仪式。世事变迁，却愈发显得原汁原味^。6

Is this irrelevant to our modern musical practices, a savage anachronism that has no bearing on our more refined, peaceful, and peace-promoting rituals? Social theorist Jacques Attali in his provocative book Noise asserts otherwise. In fact, he argues that throughout history, and even today, “the musician is an integral part of the sacrificial process, a channeler of violence.” Such a claim may seem bizarre at first blush… until you start to consider the actual performance rituals of heavy metal, punk rock, and hip-hop artists—to cite only the most obvious genres—with their stirring of the most potent emotions in closely packed settings, where inhibitions are often further reduced by alcohol or other intoxicants. Attali draws here on the theorizing of critic René Girard, who devoted decades to studying the linkages between ancient sacrificial rites and contemporary cultural institutions. This body of work is almost entirely beyond the purview of music writers, but is essential for grasping how violence and conflict can be sublimated in performance rituals. In other words, the sacrificial rite is alive today, and church services represent only a tiny portion of it. Go to the annual gathering Burning Man in the desert of northwestern Nevada—even the name reveals the linkage to sacrifice—for a full taste of one version of this ongoing tradition. The high point of the event is the fiery death of a large human effigy that takes place on the Sabbath. The more things change, the more they stay the same.⁶

我们应该以此为背景来看待基督教“祭祀”音乐的兴起。信徒们想要引导异教祭祀的能量，但他们也需要净化它。这一点在现存最古老的基督教音乐文献之一《西比利娜之书》中得到了明确的阐述。这部匿名的希腊六音步诗早在公元二世纪就已被早期教会权威引用，他们显然理解这种仪式与活人祭祀的联系，也明白需要净化这些联系。“我们不应以焚烧来玷污自己”作者断言：“我们不会因为焚烧肉堆的油脂或可怕的乙醚气味而感到不适。而是会因神圣的言语、快乐的心、爱的丰盛礼物和慷慨的双手、配得上我们上帝的圣歌和赞美诗而欢欣鼓舞，歌颂您，永恒而无误的主啊。” 除了取消血祭之外，音乐的改变也是必不可少的。在新的音乐方式下，“听不到定音鼓、钹、多孔笛子等充满无意义声音的乐器，听不到牧羊人管子像卷蛇一样的音调，也听不到喇叭狂野的喧嚣。” 根据这篇受人尊敬的经文，所有这些音乐传统都因其暴力联想而受到玷污^。7

This is the context in which we should view the rise of Christian ‘sacrificial’ music. The believers wanted to channel the energy of pagan sacrifice, but they also needed to purify it. This point is made explicitly in the Oracula Sibyllina, one of the oldest surviving texts on Christian music. This anonymous work in Greek hexameters was already cited by early church authorities back in the second century AD, and it is clear that they understood both the ritual’s connection with human sacrifice and the need to cleanse it of these associations. “We may not pollute ourselves with burning fat from flesh-consuming pyres or with the horrible smells of the ether,” the author asserts. “But rejoicing in holy speech, with a happy heart, with the rich gift of love and generous hands, with psalms and hymns worthy of our God, we are encouraged to sing your praise, O eternal and unerring one.” Along with this elimination of blood sacrifice, a change in music was absolutely required. Under the new approach, “no kettle drum is heard, no cymbal, no many-holed flute, instruments full of senseless sounds, not the tone of the shepherd’s pipe, which is like the curled snake, nor the trumpet, with its wild clamor.” All these musical traditions were, according to this revered text, tainted by their violent associations.⁷

在教会权威看来，只有一种乐器无可指摘，那就是人声。器乐被认为是危险的，既因为它的异教历史，也因为它据称对道德气质产生的有害影响——尽管讽刺的是，这种传染性在描述时，往往用揭示异教徒自身影响的语言来描述，尤其是柏拉图的影响。皈依基督教的人被鼓励放下鼓和钹，唱赞美诗和圣咏，用他们的声音赞美。早期沙漠教父之一圣潘博甚至不鼓励拍手和跺脚，因为他坚持认为这些动作带有异端邪说——这场争议至今仍在许多基督教事工中持续。你甚至可以将当今所有的教会分为两类：拍手者和非拍手者，你或许会发现，这种区别与许多其他态度和做法密切相关。但在基督教兴起的早期几个世纪里，几乎没有人质疑圣歌和赞美诗优于所有以前形式的仪式音乐，而这种转变的影响将深远。

As far as church authorities were concerned, only one musical instrument was above reproach, namely, the human voice. Instrumental music was considered dangerous, both for its pagan history and the pernicious influence it supposedly exerted on moral temperament—although it’s ironic how often this contagion was described in language revealing the influence of the pagans themselves, notably Plato. Putting aside their drums and cymbals, converts to the Christian faith were encouraged to sing hymns and psalms, giving praise with their voices. St. Pambo, one of the early desert fathers, even discouraged hand-clapping and foot-tapping because, he insisted, they carried heretical associations—and this controversy continues to the present day in many Christian ministries. You might even divide all current-day congregations into two categories, clappers and non-clappers, and probably would find that this distinction is closely correlated with a host of other attitudes and practices. But in the early centuries of Christian ascendancy, few disputed the superiority of psalms and hymns to all previous forms of ritual music, and the results of this shift would prove far reaching.

歌唱在欧洲根深蒂固地成为主流的音乐实践，并一直持续到17世纪。这种对声乐的偏爱可以通过多种方式来衡量，但或许最简单的方法就是考察巴赫之前西方主要作曲家的职业道路。例如，我们可以回顾佩罗坦、纪尧姆·德·马肖等人的生平和时代，纪尧姆·杜费、若斯坎·德普雷、希尔德加德·冯·宾根、约翰内斯·奥克冈、乔瓦尼·皮尔路易吉·达·帕莱斯特里纳、托马斯·塔利斯，以及他们同时代的大多数领军人物。他们或加入合唱团演唱，或指导合唱团，或为合唱团创作主要作品。在某些情况下，他们也展现出乐器演奏的技巧，但与他们的声乐相比，这只是他们遗产的一小部分。在巴赫之后，这种情况不仅发生了改变，而且完全逆转了——键盘和小提琴，而不是人声，开始成为西方世界作曲家的名片。这种情况在今天依然如此，一个有抱负的作曲家被期望学习键盘，但几乎不需要考虑加入合唱团。然而，1500年来，人声在西方音乐中被提升到无可争议的卓越地位，这必定是基督教历史上最具影响力的文化干预之一。

Singing became entrenched as the dominant musical practice in Europe, and it remained so until the seventeenth century. This preference for vocal music can be measured in many ways, but perhaps the simplest is to examine the career paths of the leading Western composers in the period before Bach. Consider, for example, the lives and times of Pérotin, Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, Josquin des Prez, Hildegard von Bingen, Johannes Ockeghem, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Thomas Tallis, and most of their leading contemporaries. They either sang in choirs, supervised choirs, or composed their leading works for choirs. In some instances, they also demonstrated skill on musical instruments, but this was a small part of their legacy when compared to their vocal music. After Bach, this not only changed, but reversed entirely—the keyboard and violin, not the voice, began to serve as the calling cards of composers in the Western world. That’s still true today, when an aspiring composer is expected to study the keyboard but hardly need consider joining a choir. Yet the 1,500-year elevation of the human voice to a position of unassailable preeminence in Western music must rank among the most influential cultural interventions in the history of Christianity.

对于早期教堂信徒来说，声乐不仅提升了他们尘世的礼拜，更让他们领略了即将到来的天堂的滋味。现存最古老的中世纪音乐理论著作《音乐的纪律》的作者雷奥姆的奥勒良解释说，少数人有可能听到天使的歌声，并讲述了一位虔诚的欧塞尔神父听到了圣咏第 148 篇的天籁之音。另一则轶事描述了圣维克多修道院的一位僧侣在守夜时从天使合唱团那里学到的一首赞美诗——后来，他把这首赞美诗教给了罗马的神职人员，在那里，全体会众一起唱诵。他宣称：“我们头顶的世界和天堂都在和谐的声音中循环。” ⁸

Vocal music, for the early churchgoers, not only uplifted their earthly worship, but even gave them a taste of the Paradise to come. Aurelian of Réôme, author of the oldest surviving work of medieval music theory, Musica Disciplina, explained that it was possible for a select few to hear the singing of angels, and told of a pious priest of Auxerre who was treated to a celestial rendition of the 148th Psalm. Another anecdote describes a hymn that a monk of the monastery of St. Victor learned from a choir of angels during a vigil—he later taught it to clerics in Rome, where it was sung by the entire congregation. “The very world and heaven above us,” he announced, “circulate with a harmonious sound.”⁸

然而，这种转变有些奇特。唱诵（或吟诵）诗篇成为教会生活的中心，然而诗篇本身却颂扬器乐，并且反复出现。乐器在至少16篇不同的诗篇中占据突出地位，通常以劝诫的语气出现。诗篇33篇宣称：“用竖琴赞美耶和华，用瑟和十弦的乐器向他歌唱。”在诗篇149篇中，我们发现了这样的劝诫：“愿他们跳舞赞美他的名，用鼓和竖琴向他歌颂。”在诗篇68篇中，我们甚至遇到了令人恐惧的异教代表——女手鼓手：“歌唱的走在前头，演奏的走在后头。”她们身后跟着乐器；她们中间有敲着铃鼓的少女。这种联系如此显著，以至于《诗篇》的作者大卫经常被描绘成手持竖琴。这一反复出现的形象是宗教图像中的重要元素，也提醒人们在来世将获得应得的奖赏，而竖琴在来世中占据着重要地位——不仅在漫画、笑话和流行文化中，而且在基督教文本和图像中，甚至可以追溯到《启示录》^。9

Yet there’s something peculiar about this shift. Singing (or chanting) the Psalms became central to church life, yet the Psalms themselves celebrate instrumental music, and do so repeatedly. Musical instruments figure prominently in at least sixteen different Psalms, and typically in a tone of exhortation. “Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery and an instrument of ten strings,” announces Psalm 33. In Psalm 149, we find this admonition: “Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp.” And in Psalm 68 we even encounter that much-feared representative of paganism, the female tambourine player: “The singers went before, the players on instruments followed after; among them were the damsels playing with timbrels.” This connection is so prominent that David, the attributed composer of the Psalms, is frequently depicted with harp in hand. This recurring image, a staple of religious iconography, also serves as a reminder of merited rewards in the afterlife, where the harp figures prominently—not just in cartoons, jokes, and popular culture, but in Christian texts and images going back to the Book of Revelation.⁹

将乐器，尤其是打击乐器，从仪式中剔除，不幸地导致了与狂喜和恍惚状态密切相关的那些元素被移除。如今，我们理解了节奏对大脑活动的影响，以及击鼓在此过程中扮演的关键角色，无论是通过科学家的临床研究，还是在现实世界中实际产生的恍惚状态中，都得到了证实。或许早期基督教的领袖们本能地意识到了这一点，并特意决定构建一种有利于顺从的仪式结构，同时避免恍惚状态下强烈的个人主义体验。但这项政策难以执行：歌曲具有双重力量。它们既可以产生有纪律的群体凝聚力，也可以导致不受控制地抛弃所有纪律和约束。随着社会运动从早期的魅力型阶段发展到更加官僚化和规范化的实践，任何极端的仪式性狂喜，往好了说是令人尴尬，往坏了说是对等级制度的威胁。到了那个时候，最好放下鼓，唱起能增强凝聚力的赞美诗。教会领袖或许已经意识到了这一点，或许只是在不断尝试中才掌握了它。

The elimination of musical instruments, especially percussion, from ritual had the unfortunate effect of removing those very ingredients most closely associated with ecstasy and trance. We now understand how much influence rhythm exerts on brain activity, and the key role drumming plays in this process, whether measured in a clinical study by a scientist or in actual trance-producing settings out in the real world. Perhaps the leaders of early Christianity were instinctively aware of this, and made a deliberate decision to construct a ritual structure conducive to conformity while avoiding the intensely individualistic experiences that come in a trance state. But that’s a hard policy to enforce: songs have a dual power. They can produce both disciplined group cohesion and an uncontrolled throwing off of all discipline and restraint. As social movements evolve from their early charismatic stage to more bureaucratic and codified practices, any extreme kind of ritual ecstasy becomes, at best, an embarrassment, and at worst a threat to the hierarchy. At that juncture, it’s best to put the drums away and sing cohesion-producing anthems instead. Church leaders may have been conscious of this, or perhaps merely grasped it through trial and error.

无论如何，教会解决了一个问题，却又引发了另一个问题。宗教对催眠状态的需求与对教条的需求一样多，甚至可能更多。我怀疑，中世纪基督教中强烈吟唱的出现和制度化，最终成为修道院生活的核心元素，正是源于这种对超越的渴望，以及在教会禁止击鼓、拍手和其他更直接的神经同步方式的限制下，有节奏的吟唱是实现超越的最佳方式这一发现。但还有一个要点：鼓声大约十分钟就能改变你的意识状态，但吟唱则需要更长的时间。仪式和教条必须适应这种生理需求。

In any event, the church solved one problem and caused another. Religions require trance as much as they do dogma, perhaps even more. I suspect that the later emergence and institutionalization of intense chanting in medieval Christianity, which would eventually become the core element in monastic life, drew on this need for transcendence, and the discovery that rhythmic chanting was the best way of achieving it within the constraints imposed by the church’s prohibition of drumming, hand-clapping, and other more straightforward paths to neural entrainment. But there’s a catch: a drum can change your state of consciousness in around ten minutes, but with chanting, a much longer period of time is necessary. Ritual and dogma must adjust to this biological necessity.

20世纪60年代末，反传统音乐治疗师阿尔弗雷德·托马蒂斯介入了法国南部恩卡尔卡特修道院的一场危机，这出人意料地证实了这种必要性。当时，反传统音乐治疗师阿尔弗雷德·托马蒂斯介入了一场危机，这场危机发生在法国南部的恩卡尔卡特修道院。修道院里的僧侣们饱受集体疲惫和普遍抑郁的折磨。用托马蒂斯的话来说，他们“像湿抹布一样瘫倒在牢房里”。其他医生的治疗都失败了，但托马蒂斯立刻意识到，这些倦怠的僧侣们是因为梵蒂冈第二次大公会议改革后修道院对他们诵经的限制而遭受痛苦。他说服了修道院院长恢复传统的诵经。“到了11月，几乎所有人都恢复了正常活动，”托马蒂斯后来自豪地说，“那就是他们的祈祷、他们仅有的几个小时的睡眠，以及传奇般的本笃会作息时间。”当僧侣们被允许诵经时，他们只需睡四个小时就能维持充足的精力，进行数小时的诵经，并完成寺院生活的所有琐事。如果没有诵经，无论睡多少觉都无法弥补精神能量的损失^。10

A surprising confirmation of this necessity took place in the late 1960s, when the iconoclastic music therapist Alfred Tomatis intervened in a crisis at the Abbaye d’En-Calcat in the south of France. Here the monks were afflicted by collective exhaustion and widespread depression. In Tomatis’s words, they “were slumping in their cells like wet dishrags.” Other medical practitioners had failed in their remedies, but Tomatis immediately grasped that the listless monks were suffering from recent restrictions on their chanting imposed by the monastery in the aftermath of the Vatican II reforms. He convinced the head abbot to reinstate the traditional chants. “By November, almost all of them had gone back to their normal activities,” Tomatis would later boast, “that is their prayer, their few hours of sleep, and the legendary Benedictine work schedule.” When allowed to chant, the monks could get by on just four hours of sleep and still have ample energy for hours of chanting as well as all the chores of monastic life. Without the chant, no amount of sleep could compensate for the disruption in their psychic energy.¹⁰

中世纪僧侣的生活浸润在音乐之中。西欧修道院的兴起标志着人们对教会世俗纠葛的反抗，并提供了一种更简单的灵修方式，专注于祈祷、体力劳动和戒律。随着这些团体的修行方式逐渐规范化，深夜守夜和每日的祈祷间歇被规定的吟诵圣咏所取代。圣本笃（480-547）制定了《规约》，这是基督教历史上最具影响力的修道生活指南，在1500多年后仍然激励着信徒。这部作品对吟诵圣咏的重视程度，或许可以通过比较本笃专门论述过失和惩罚的八章与论述日课的十二章来最好地体现。本笃详细地规定了在修道生活中，每天、每一天、每季应该如何吟诵圣咏。他热情地他坚持告诉他的追随者，他们必须“唱诵圣歌，使心灵和声音和谐一致”，始终记住他们“在上帝和他的天使面前” ^。11

The life of a medieval monk was steeped in music. The rise of the monasteries in Western Europe marked a reaction against the worldly entanglements of the church and offered a simpler mode of devotion focused on prayer, manual work, and discipline. As the practices of these groups became more codified, the late-night vigils and daily interludes of prayer were replaced with the prescribed chanting of the Psalms. St. Benedict (480–547) established the Rule, the most influential guide to monastic life in the history of Christianity, and one that still inspires followers more than 1,500 years later. The prominence this work gives to the performance of the Psalms can perhaps best be measured by comparing the eight chapters Benedict devotes to faults and punishments with the twelve chapters on the Divine Office. Here Benedict specifies in detail how Psalms should be chanted over the course of the hours and days and seasons of monastic life. With vehement insistence, he tells his followers that they must “sing the psalms that mind and voice may be in harmony,” remembering always that they are “in the presence of God and his angels.”¹¹

但这种对声乐的颂扬很容易误导人们。那些在歌唱受其控制时期大力推广歌唱的宗教权威，同时也热衷于消灭歌唱的所有其他表现形式。在西方世界历史上，没有任何一种力量像早期基督教徒那样，如此坚决地监管、禁止和惩罚民众歌唱。教士们对音乐的侵入性批评，甚至深入到家庭和卧室来执行其命令，在近一千年的时间里始终如一地盛行。乍一看，祭司们在这一项目中取得的成功似乎令人震惊，至少考虑到在游吟诗人兴起之前的漫长世纪里，几乎没有任何一首欧洲本土语言的世俗歌曲流传下来。然而，我们知道这些歌曲确实存在。它们可能有成千上万首，但几乎所有的都被排除在了为后世保存下来的文本之外。偶尔，宗教文献中会有一些零散的字迹被偷偷抄录，或许是偶然，或许是某个叛逆抄写员的反抗。但这些只是罕见的例外。

But one could easily be misled by this celebration of vocal music. The same religious authorities who fostered singing when it was under their control also worked zealously to eliminate all its other manifestations. No force in the history of the Western world has ever matched the early Christians in their determination to police, prohibit, and punish singing among the populace. The intrusive music criticism of the clerics, which reached even into homes and bedchambers to enforce its dictates, prevailed with remarkable consistency for a period of almost one thousand years. At first glance, the priests’ success in this project seems stunning, at least when we consider that virtually no secular songs in the vernacular European languages have survived from the long centuries preceding the rise of the troubadours. Yet we know these songs existed. There were probably tens of thousands of them, but almost all were excluded from the texts preserved for posterity. Occasionally a few stray lines appear, furtively copied in a religious document, perhaps by chance, or maybe in perverse defiance by a rebellious scribe. But these were rare exceptions.

我们怎么能确定这些歌曲曾经盛行？最好的证据就是它们遭受谴责的频率和强度。数百份针对这些歌曲的攻击留存至今，然而，学者们对这些来自音乐批评史的有趣文献却少得惊人。“据我所知，还没有哪份研究专门针对如此多的谴责，”中世纪学者约翰·海恩斯评论道，但他也指出，这些谴责与现代关于音乐在社会中的作用的讨论息息相关。海恩斯最初开始研究这个主题时，它唤起了他鲜活的回忆，回忆起他在原教旨主义基督教徒中成长的经历，尤其是他从一位来访的传教士那里听到的对摇滚乐的猛烈谴责，这位传教士“讲述了爱丽丝·库珀与恶魔交往、琳达·朗斯塔特引诱上帝的子民以及约翰·列侬声称自己比耶稣基督更伟大的悲惨故事”。三十年后，他沉浸在对一个被遗忘的……回顾中世纪的生活，海恩斯惊讶地发现，对流行音乐的攻击基调竟如此之少。“他布道时所有隐晦或明确的主题都体现在了这里：中年人对青春活力的恐惧；青春期对节奏和美的渴望；魔鬼和他的鼓；性感的女人和柔弱的男人随着撒旦的节拍起舞，唱着恶魔般的歌曲；以及歌曲引诱人、将人打入地狱的力量。” ¹²

How can we be certain these songs flourished? Our best evidence is the frequency and intensity with which they were condemned. Hundreds of attacks on these songs have survived, yet scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to these intriguing documents from the history of music criticism. “To my knowledge, no single study has been devoted to these many condemnations,” remarks medievalist John Haines, yet he also notes their relevance to modern discussions about the role of music in society. When Haines first began studying the subject, it brought up vivid memories of his upbringing among fundamentalist Christians, and in particular a fierce denunciation of rock ’n’ roll he had heard from a visiting preacher, who “told harrowing tales of Alice Cooper consorting with demons, of Linda Ronstadt seducing men of God and of John Lennon claiming he was bigger than Jesus Christ.” Thirty years later, immersed in his studies of a forgotten branch of medieval life, Haines was surprised how little had changed in the tone of the attacks on popular music. “All the themes of his sermon, implicit and explicit were there: middle-aged apprehension of youthful energy; adolescent desire for rhythm and beauty; the devil and his drums; voluptuous women and effeminate men dancing to Satan’s beat and singing diabolical songs; and the power of song to seduce and damn to hell.”¹²

然而，我不确定哪个更令人惊讶：中世纪论战在现代社会中诡异的回响，还是研究人员对歌曲史上这段奇特篇章几乎完全缺乏兴趣。中世纪教堂音乐的学术研究成果足以填满一座图书馆，但教会不想让你听到的音乐却几乎激不起人们的好奇心。正如海恩斯准确总结的那样，传统的历史将这种音乐的演变描述为“一系列伟人或更伟大人物的进步，他们的创新成就推动读者走向中世纪晚期复调音乐的完美境界”。这一进程的基础是格里高利圣咏，它以公元六世纪后期基督教世界中最有权势的人——教皇格里高利大帝的名字命名，几乎所有原始文献都将他誉为一位杰出的音乐创新者——他不仅是仪式的改革者，更是他那个时代杰出的作曲家。我们或许应该怀疑，世俗权力再次与艺术视野的归因如此完美地契合。到目前为止，我们已经多次看到这种重叠——在音乐创新被归于大卫王、所罗门王、舜帝、孔子等人的时代。当那些掌握权力的人在现存的记载中成为音乐巨星时，怀疑是唯一正确的回应，但我们应该更加关注这些文本所遗漏的内容。想象一下，如果我们将宗教（和其他）权威所谴责的音乐排除在外，现代歌曲史将会是什么样子？¹³

Yet I’m not sure which is more surprising: the eerie echoing of medieval polemics in modern society, or the almost complete lack of interest by researchers in this strange chapter in the history of song. The amount of scholarship devoted to church music in the medieval period would fill a library, but the music the church didn’t want you to hear stirs up very little curiosity. The conventional history, as Haines accurately summarizes it, presents the evolution of this music as “a progression of great or greater men whose innovative achievements move the reader towards the perfection of late medieval polyphony.” The foundation of this process is the Gregorian chant, named after the most powerful man in Christendom during the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great, who is celebrated in almost all of our source documents as a towering musical innovator—not just a reformer of ritual, but the preeminent composer of his day. We should perhaps be suspicious that temporal power again coincides so perfectly with attributions of artistic vision. By now we have seen this same overlap many times—in the assignment of musical innovations to King David, King Solomon, Emperor Shun, Confucius, and others. Skepticism is the only proper response when those who hold the reins of power turn into music superstars in the surviving accounts, but we ought to be even more concerned over what such texts omit. Imagine what the history of modern song would look like if we eliminated from consideration the music denounced by religious (and other) authorities?¹³

在基督教欧洲，这些谴责通常针对宗教节日或圣地演唱的歌曲。教皇尤提基乌斯宣称：“禁止妇女在教堂和教堂墓地唱歌、跳圈舞、进行嬉戏和唱歌。”在公元三世纪。公元五世纪初，圣奥古斯丁抱怨圣塞浦路斯的安息之地有亵渎神明的表演：“那个地方整夜都在唱着可憎的歌，跳着可憎的舞。”一个世纪后，阿尔勒的凯撒略仍在哀叹人们“来到圣人的节日只是为了喝得酩酊大醉、跳舞、唱着淫秽的歌曲、带领跳圈舞、像魔鬼一样旋转”。这些以及神职人员的其他抱怨似乎表明，民众喜欢亵渎神明，等待宗教节日来发泄他们邪恶的冲动。也许这是真的，中世纪的奥兹·奥斯本和爱丽丝·库珀出现在教堂墓地里制造混乱。但我相信，如果我们仅仅把它们看作是人们节日生活的典型，我们就能更接近这些音乐表演的现实。他们的本土歌曲在圣日期间占据主导地位，原因很简单，因为这些日子是专门用来庆祝和狂欢的^。14

In Christian Europe, these denunciations were frequently directed at songs performed on religious feasts or in holy places. “Do not allow women’s song and ring-dances and playful games and songs in the church and churchyard,” declared Pope Eutychius in the third century. St. Augustine, in the early fifth century, complained about blasphemous performances at the resting place of St. Cyprian: “All night long in that place abominations have been sung and danced to with songs.” A century later, Caesarius of Arles was still lamenting people “who come to the feasts of saints only to get drunk, dance, sing songs with lewd words, lead ring-dances and twirl like the devil.” These and other complaints by clerics might seem to suggest that the populace harbored a taste for blasphemy and waited for religious holidays to vent their diabolical urges. Perhaps that was true, and medieval equivalents of Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper showed up in the churchyard to wreak havoc. But I believe we get closer to the reality of these musical performances if we simply consider them as typical of the festive life of the people. Their vernacular songs came to the forefront during holy days for the simple reason that these were the times set aside for celebration and revelry.¹⁴

谁唱了这些罪恶的世俗歌曲？宗教权威一次又一次地呼吁人们关注女性在基督教社会传播音乐污染方面的有害作用。公元六世纪后期，教会领袖聚集在欧塞尔，商讨如何根除条顿和高卢皈依者的迷信和异教习俗，并颁布了一项禁令，禁止在教堂演唱“ puellarum cantica ”（女孩的歌曲）。这些歌曲均未留存下来，因此我们无法确定这些女孩在她们的音乐中可能涉及了哪些不雅主题。但大约在同一时期，凯撒留主教抱怨许多女性“熟记并高声吟诵魔鬼的色情淫秽歌曲”。在下个世纪中叶，沙隆会议谴责“由女性合唱的淫秽可耻的歌曲”。 853 年的罗马会议上提供了进一步的细节，会上妇女被指控在歌曲中使用verba turpia（脏话）、跳舞和组成异教合唱团^。15

Who sang these sinful secular songs? Again and again, religious authorities call attention to the pernicious role of women in spreading musical contamination through Christian society. When church leaders gathered at Auxerre in the late sixth century to consider how to extirpate the superstitions and pagan practices of Teutonic and Gallic converts, they issued a prohibition on puellarum cantica, or “girls’ songs,” in church. None of these songs have survived, so we can’t say with any certainty what naughty subjects the girls might have addressed in their music. But around this same time, Bishop Caesarius complained about the many women “who know by heart and recite out loud the Devil’s songs, erotic and obscene.” In the middle of the next century, the Council of Chalons condemned “obscene and shameful songs… with choruses of women.” Further details were provided at the Council of Rome in 853, where women were accused of using verba turpia (dirty words) in their songs, as well as dancing and forming pagan choruses.¹⁵

只有在极少数情况下，这些歌曲才会被明确归咎于妓女。例如，9世纪初，海莫主教就曾提及“妓女之歌”的“淫荡放荡”。立法者有时也会加入这场运动，实施法令，限制夜间街头女性唱歌拉客——这些禁令提醒我们，直到最近，唱歌在世界各地都被认为是性交易中一项宝贵的技能。但公开的拉客只是中世纪人所担心的女性唱歌蔓延的极小一部分。无论处女还是家庭主妇，没有哪个女人能够免受教会对其音乐选择的监督。我们了解到，即使是修女也需要密切监督，正如查理曼大帝在789年对女修道院院长关于winileodas （献给朋友的歌）的危险性的指示所表明的那样——“绝不让她们敢写winileodas，也不要把它们从修道院里送出来。”这些献给朋友的歌有多友好？我们永远不会知道。这些被禁的歌词并没有被保存下来。然而，从频繁重复的禁令和攻击中，我们知道，在基督教世界的最初一千年里，女性一直在唱着淫荡的歌曲^。16

Only on the rarest occasions were these songs specifically attributed to prostitutes. For example, Bishop Haymo in the early ninth century referred to the “whorish wantonness” of the “songs of prostitutes.” Lawgivers sometimes joined in this crusade, implementing statutes restricting the singing solicitations of women in the streets at night—prohibitions that remind us that, until very recently, singing has been considered, in almost every part of the world, a valuable skill in the sex trade. But overt solicitations were only the smallest part of the contagion of female vocalizing feared by the medieval mind. No woman was exempt, whether virgin or housewife, from church oversight of her musical choices. Even nuns, we learn, required close supervision, as demonstrated by Charlemagne’s instruction to abbesses in 789 on the dangers of winileodas (songs for a friend)—“On no account let them dare to write winileodas, or send them from the convent.” How friendly were these songs for a friend? We will never know. These forbidden lyrics were not preserved. Yet from the frequently repeated prohibitions and attacks we know that women continued singing licentious songs throughout the first thousand years of Christendom.¹⁶

所有这些令人震惊的是，基督教权威与他们的异教前辈们在优先考虑的事情上竟如此一致。他们的理论观察和形而上学截然不同，因此教士们对罪恶和亵渎的痴迷也随之而来，但他们对音乐批评的实际应用却与古希腊和罗马精英阶层所推崇的几乎完全相同。在这两种情况下，音乐的危险都与女性特质相关，尤其是在感官享受和情感放纵方面。基督教会议甚至采纳了古代对音乐哀歌的谴责，而这种歌曲形式总是与女性联系在一起。中世纪的教会领袖们几乎不可能知道，哀歌在其早期与性有着千丝万缕的联系，在哀悼垂死之神的同时，也伴随着生育仪式的露骨画面，甚至在很多情况下，还可能与实际的通奸行为有关。但教会权威几乎不需要这些信息来谴责哀歌：这些歌曲在女性心中激起的强烈情感，足以成为禁止使用它们的充分理由。

What is striking from all this is how closely Christian authorities maintained the same priorities as their pagan predecessors. Their theoretical observations and metaphysics were completely different, hence the clerics’ obsession with sin and blasphemy, but the real-life applications of their music criticism are almost identical with those favored by the elites of ancient Greece and Rome. The dangers of music, in both instances, were associated with feminine qualities, especially with regard to sensuality and emotional excess. The Christian councils even adopted the ancient condemnation of musical laments, a form of song invariably associated with women. The medieval church leaders could hardly have known that the lament, in its earliest days, was inextricably connected with sexuality, where mourning for the dying god was combined with the explicit imagery of fertility rites, and probably, in many instances, actual fornication. But church authorities hardly needed such information to denounce the lament: the strong emotions these songs aroused in women were sufficient reason to prohibit their use.

我们也在这里发现了与当代世界音乐问题意想不到的关联。值得注意的是，中国政府目前正在努力杜绝雇佣脱衣舞娘进行音乐伴奏表演的做法。作为葬礼仪式的一部分。这一传统在农村地区尤为盛行——在21世纪的权威人士看来，这是一种令人费解且不敬的习俗，但它与古代丧葬音乐与情色歌曲之间的联系非常契合。这三种元素在这里再次出现：对逝者的哀悼，对淫乱的诱惑，以及当局的镇压。再次强调，世事变迁，却愈发显得原样。

Here, too, we encounter an unexpected correlation with musical matters in our contemporary world. It’s worth noting that the Chinese government, in the present day, is trying to eradicate the practice of hiring strippers to perform with musical accompaniment as part of funeral rites. This tradition is especially popular in rural areas—a puzzling and disrespectful custom in the minds of twenty-first-century authorities, but very much aligned with the ancient connection between the music of death and songs of eroticism. Here all three ingredients recur: laments for the departed, music as an enticement to fornication, and repression by the authorities. Once again, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

无论在异教还是基督教教义中，男人都是女性诱人歌谣的毫无戒心的受害者，而这些女性可能是塞壬、女巫、妓女，或者仅仅是圣徒节日里吟唱的贞洁农家少女。无论表演者的角色或意图如何，这类音乐都需要干预，并且尽可能地用根深蒂固的制度所认可的歌曲来取代。

In both pagan and Christian teachings, men were the unsuspecting victims of the alluring songs of women, who might, for their part, be Sirens, witches, whores, or just a chaste peasant girl singing on a saint’s feast day. No matter what the role or intention of the performer, such music required intervention and, wherever possible, replacement with the sanctioned songs of the entrenched institutions.

然而，即使是主流机构也比我们想象的更为复杂。本书反复出现的主题是，局外人和叛逆者在推动音乐创新方面发挥着重要作用，而这些创新后来被主流文化的领导者所采纳并合法化。下一章我们将看到，那些因创作关于爱情和性的淫秽歌曲而不断受到教会攻击的女性，是如何预示了西方音乐史上最大的转变，其标志是游吟诗人的崛起以及关于个人情感的世俗歌曲的合法化。但即使是天主教高层内部的音乐理解，也能通过了解其主要音乐创新者身上的反叛精神得到加深。基督教音乐生活的许多关键方面都来自备受争议的改革者。圣本笃在公元六世纪将圣歌置于修道院生活的中心，而圣方济各则创作了第一首意大利白话歌曲，直接模仿了十三世纪那些罪恶的游吟诗人。然而，本笃会成立后，其内部关于音乐的争斗依然激烈，创新者也受到了惩罚。九世纪末十世纪初本笃会的首席音乐理论家胡克巴尔德被迫退出该会，不得不寻求主教的庇护。几十年后加入本笃会的阿雷佐的圭多，如今被誉为音乐的发明者。他不仅会谱写乐谱，还因扰乱秩序的音乐行为而被修道院驱逐。在一封现存的信中，他哀叹“非利士人的阴谋”使他“被驱逐出美好的领地”——并继续抱怨“工匠的嫉妒使他不愿将自己的秘密传授给任何人” ^。17

Yet even the dominant institutions are more complex than we may realize. A recurring theme of this book is the significance of outsiders and renegades in launching musical innovations that are later adopted—and legitimized—by the leaders of mainstream culture. We shall see in the next chapter how the same women incessantly attacked by the church for their filthy songs about love and sex anticipated the biggest shift in the history of Western music, marked by the rise of the troubadours and the legitimization of secular songs about personal emotions. But even our understanding of music inside the Catholic hierarchy is enhanced by grasping the rebel streak in its leading music innovators. Many of the key aspects of Christian musical life came from controversial reformers. This is just as true with St. Benedict, who placed chant at the center of monastic life in the sixth century, as it is with St. Francis, who composed the first song in vernacular Italian in direct imitation of the sinful troubadours of the thirteenth century. Yet after the Benedictines became established, battles over music still raged within its ranks and innovators were punished. Hucbald, the leading Benedictine music theorist of the late ninth and early tenth centuries, was forced out of the order and had to seek the protection of the bishop. Guido of Arezzo, who joined the Benedictines a few decades later, is lauded today as the inventor of musical notation, but he was also evicted from the monastery because of his disruptive musical practices. In a surviving letter, he bewails “the conspiring of the Philistines” who caused him to be “banished from pleasant domains”—and goes on to complain that “the jealousy of the artisan made him unwilling to teach anyone his secret.”¹⁷

他到底在说什么？如今很难想象有人会对乐谱感到愤怒，但在中世纪，这种简单的权宜之计却对歌唱教师和唱诗班领队构成了威胁。在乐谱出现之前，你需要去找那些权贵才能学歌，但有了圭多的乐谱，你就可以自学旋律了。在我们看来，阿雷佐的圭多是一位受人尊敬的创新者，但在他那个时代，他却是一个麻烦，一个威胁。

What in the world is he talking about? Nowadays it’s hard to imagine anyone getting angry about musical notation, but in the medieval era that simple expedient posed a threat to singing masters and choir leaders. Before the arrival of written music, you needed to go to those power brokers to get taught songs, but with Guido’s notation you could learn the melodies on your own. Guido of Arezzo is, for us, an esteemed innovator, but in his day he was a nuisance and a threat.

本笃本人也是如此。他如今是受人尊敬的圣徒，但在他那个时代，他却是一个激进分子，招致了教会内部强大反对派的愤怒。据说，本笃曾两次被愤怒的教士毒死，并因其执意改革宗教生活而面临重重阻碍和迫害。本笃如今被认为是西方历史上最伟大的精神远见者之一，但直到他去世几十年后，才有人认为他的生平细节值得保存。你能猜出是谁最终决定研究并保存本笃的生平吗？教皇格里高利，如今被尊为基督教吟诵之父，几乎是我们所知一切圣本笃的来源。格里高利的记述基于与本笃四位弟子的讨论，并为我们留下了详尽的叙述，讲述了这位改革家的伟大事迹和奇迹。在他那个时代，他对罗马的颓废景象感到厌恶，离开了那里。

The same is true of Benedict himself, now a revered saint but in his own time a radical who incurred the wrath of powerful adversaries inside the church. We are told that Benedict survived two attempts at poisoning by angry clerics and faced many obstacles and persecutions because of his obstinate attempts to reform religious life. Benedict is now considered one of the great spiritual visionaries in Western history, but no one thought the details of his life worth preserving until several decades after his death. Can you guess who finally decided to research and preserve Benedict’s life story? Pope Gregory, nowadays honored as the father of Christian chanting, is the source of almost everything we know about St. Benedict. Gregory based his account on discussions with four of Benedict’s disciples, and left us a detailed narrative relating the great deeds and miracles of the reformer who, in his own day, left Rome in disgust at the decadence he saw there.

我们可以将这一过程视为教皇格里高利对圣本笃改革迟来的认可的一个简单案例，但同样真实，甚至可能更具启发性的是，格里高利通过将自己与这位曾经备受争议的前任联系起来，使自己的音乐及其他活动合法化。从公元543年本笃去世到590年格里高利登基，大约相隔了半个世纪——这大约与鲍勃·迪伦用抗议震撼权威的时间相同。歌曲以及他后来获得诺贝尔奖的经历。无论我们谈论的是摇滚乐手还是吟唱乐手，这都是音乐主流化过程的典型持续时间。这场反抗虽然制度化，但过程复杂，进展缓慢，一路上面临重重障碍。史书保留了官方的记载，淡化了早期摩擦的细节，而最有说服力的证据往往被销毁。

We can look at this process as a straightforward case of Pope Gregory expressing belated approval of St. Benedict’s reforms, but it’s just as true, and perhaps even more revealing, that Gregory legitimized his own activities, musical and otherwise, by linking himself with this once controversial predecessor. Roughly half a century elapsed between the death of Benedict in the year 543 and the papacy of Gregory in 590—approximately the same length of time between Bob Dylan shaking up the establishment with his protest songs and his later acceptance of a Nobel Prize. That’s a typical duration for this process of musical mainstreaming, whether we are talking about rockers or chanters. The rebellion is institutionalized, but it’s a messy process that happens slowly, confronting many obstacles along the way. History books retain the official account, downplaying details of the earlier friction, and the most revealing evidence is often destroyed.

从这些例子可以看出，中世纪许多最具突破性的音乐运动都源于天主教信仰的核心，这常常令教会领袖感到沮丧。其中，没有什么比被称为戈利亚德的叛教牧师的音乐更有趣、更值得关注的了。如果说这一时期的基督教社会有一种反主流文化，那么戈利亚德就处于这种反主流文化的核心地位，尽管他们中很少有人获得地位和影响力，但他们在欧洲音乐世俗化过程中发挥了决定性作用。许多戈利亚德成员放弃了他们的宗教秩序，过着不太自律的生活，在社会边缘生存。他们经常从一个城镇游荡到另一个城镇，因此有时被称为vagantes，即“流浪的学生”。他们在大学城里最为引人注目，他们在那里逗留或学习、教学，或仅仅是为了享受这种环境中的繁华。在那个识字稀少、博学之士更是凤毛麟角的时代，戈利亚德家族的人虽然财富不多，却凭借着他们的学识在世界各地脱颖而出。他们凭借着自己的智慧、教育背景，以及——对我们的历史来说最重要的——他们作为表演者或艺人的技能，在社会上闯荡。

As such examples show, many of the most transgressive musical movements of the medieval era sprang from the heart of the Catholic faith, often to the dismay of church leaders. Among these, none is more intriguing and deserving of attention than the music of the renegade clerics known as the Goliards. If Christian society during this period could be said to have a counterculture, the Goliards operated at the heart of it, and though few of them achieved positions of rank and influence, they played a decisive role in secularizing European music. Many of the Goliards had abandoned their religious orders for a less disciplined life, surviving on the fringes of society. They often traveled from town to town, and for that reason were sometimes referred to as vagantes, or “wandering students.” They were most noticeable in university towns, where they lingered either to study, to teach, or merely to enjoy the bustling activity of such settings. In an age when literacy was rare and erudition even rarer, the Goliards stood out wherever they traveled due to their learning, although their worldly wealth was modest. They made their way in society by relying on their wits, their education, and—most important for our history—their skills as performers or entertainers.

尽管在中世纪，宗教誓言代表着终身的承诺——教皇英诺森三世声称，即使是他本人也无权撤销这一神圣的义务——但长期以来，神职人员一直在寻找逃避教职的方法，有些人直接翻墙而过，有些人干脆走出门外。早在5世纪初，圣约翰·卡西安就指出，僧侣们就像奴隶一样，可能会试图在夜幕的掩护下偷偷溜走，而圣本笃在他的规则中被迫为那些离开僧侣团体并希望回归的僧侣们做出安排。“戈利亚德”（Goliard）的标签将直到十二世纪才出现，但我们有充分的理由相信，这些叛逆的牧师在他们的歌曲被记录在手稿中之前就对欧洲音乐和娱乐产生了影响。

Even though religious vows represented a lifelong commitment during the Middle Ages—Pope Innocent III claimed that even he had no authority to rescind this holy obligation—clerics had long sought ways of escaping from their orders, some literally climbing over the wall, others merely walking out the door. As far back as the early fifth century, St. John Cassian had noted that monks, like slaves, might try to sneak away under cover of darkness, and St. Benedict in his Rule was forced to make provisions for monks who left the community and wished to return. The label “Goliard” would not emerge until the twelfth century, but we have good reason to believe that these renegade clerics had an impact on European music and entertainment long before their songs were documented in manuscripts.

与许多其他世俗歌曲一样，我们最初了解到不服从教士的歌曲，是从对他们的攻击中得知的。公元六世纪的欧塞尔会议禁止祭司在宴会上唱歌跳舞——这显然是上文提到的对这些庆典异教色彩担忧的延伸。但其中特别提到宗教团体成员，表明即使在中世纪初期，祭司和僧侣也有娱乐大众的愿望。对于流浪教士和渴望过宗教生活的人的世俗倾向的抱怨和禁令可以追溯到更早。早在公元370年，罗马皇帝瓦伦斯和瓦伦提尼安就下令逮捕那些放弃公民责任、“打着宗教的旗号加入隐士僧侣团伙”的“懒惰信徒”。 451年，迦克墩公会议对神职人员的行动颁布了严厉的限制——禁止他们更换教区、在多个教堂任职，或在未经主教许可的情况下在新地点主持仪式。此后，许多公会议和当局也颁布了类似的规定，并越来越多地提及这些野蛮僧侣和神父的不雅行为和表现。例如，一部七世纪的爱尔兰教规谴责神职人员“用粗言秽语开玩笑”和“在宴会上唱歌，不是为了建立信仰，而是为了取悦听众” ^。18

As with so many other secular songs, we first learn about those of the disobedient clerics from attacks made against them. The Council at Auxerre, in the sixth century, prohibited priests from singing and dancing at feasts—clearly an extension of the concerns mentioned above over the pagan overtones of these celebrations. But the specific reference to members of religious orders tells us that even at the dawn of the Middle Ages, priests and monks had aspirations to entertain. Complaints and prohibitions about the secular leanings of wandering clerics and those who aspired to a religious life date back even further. As early as 370, the Roman emperors Valens and Valentinian ordered the arrest of “devotees of idleness” who, abandoning their civic responsibilities, “under the pretext of religion have joined with bands of hermit monks.” In 451, the Council of Chalcedon issued harsh restrictions on the movements of clerics—prohibiting them from changing dioceses, serving in multiple churches, or officiating in new locations without the permission of their bishop. A host of later councils and authorities imposed similar rules, with increasing reference to the unseemly behavior and performances of these feral monks and priests. For example, an Irish canon from the seventh century denounces clerics who “jested with foul words” and “sang at banquets, not building the faith but gratifying the ears.”¹⁸

戈利亚德的曲目几乎涵盖了所有令人不快的内容：讽刺作品、饮酒歌、对礼拜仪式和宗教音乐的戏仿、粗俗歌词、对权贵（包括教皇）的批评、情歌、赌博歌曲以及其他无聊的娱乐活动。例如，戈利亚德最著名的诗歌集《布兰诗歌》中的这句歌词，描述了一次漫长的妓院之旅：

The Goliards’ repertoire included something to upset almost everyone: satires, drinking songs, parodies of liturgy and religious music, bawdy lyrics, criticisms of powerful people (including the pope), love songs, gambling songs, and other idle entertainments. For example, this lyric from the Carmina Burana, the most famous collection of Goliard texts, describes a long visit to a bordello:

我想，我和她在那里逗留了三个月，

只要我的钱包鼓了，我就会过着显赫的生活

。

For three months, I suppose, I lingered there with her,

and as long as my purse was full I lived as a man of

distinction.

但现在离开金星后，我失去了

金钱和衣服，

But now on leaving Venus, I have been relieved of

money and clothing,

所以我是个穷光蛋。

and so I am a pauper.

但作者在故事结尾处却采取了一种道德立场：“年轻人，让你们听到的这个故事吓倒你们吧。” ¹⁹我们在这些歌词中一次又一次地看到这样的否定，但它们的说服力，就像烟草公司在香烟盒上贴的警示标签一样——戈利亚德人劝人不要这样做，他却试图推销。例如，在这首歌颂骰子之神德西乌斯的歌中，它既警告人们不要欺骗，又颂扬欺骗的好处：

But the author takes a moralizing stance at the end of his story: “Young men, let this story which you hear deter you.”¹⁹ We find such disavowals again and again in these lyrics, but they possess about as much conviction as a tobacco company’s warning label on a pack of cigarettes—what the Goliard advises against he also tries to sell. As, for example, in this song in praise of Decius, the god of dice, which both warns against deceit and exalts in its benefits:

赌神

The gambler’s god

根本就是欺诈；

Is simply fraud;

损失之痛

The pang of losses

一个笑话

One counts a joke

当双重背叛

When double-crosses

给他赢一件斗篷^。20

Win him a cloak.²⁰

另一首抒情诗提出了同性恋的指控，但很快遭到反驳：“我的情妇为何怀疑我？……我满足于自然之爱，并学会了主动而非被动。” ²¹但并非戈利亚德的每一项罪孽都伴随着免责声明或否认。“没有比这更优美的歌颂饮酒的歌曲了，”学者乔治·威彻（George Whicher）在赞扬这位大诗人的《内在的埃斯图安》（Estuans intrinsecus，有时被称为《戈利亚斯的忏悔》）时说道：

In another lyric the charge of homosexuality is raised, but quickly rebutted: “Why does my mistress hold me in suspicion?… I am content with natural love and have learned to take the active, not the passive role.”²¹ But not every Goliard sin comes with a disclaimer or denial. “No finer song in praise of drinking has ever been written,” the scholar George Whicher declared in praise of the Archpoet’s Estuans intrinsecus, sometimes called “The Confession of Golias”:

我的意图是去死

My intention is to die

在酒馆喝酒；

In the tavern drinking;

必须有酒在手边，因为我

Wine must be at hand, for I

当我沉沦时，想要它^。22

Want it when I’m sinking.²²

宫廷爱情的高尚情操很快便渗透到了整个欧洲的诗歌和歌曲中，偶尔也会在戈利亚德的歌词中出现，其中一些歌词甚至早于最早的吟游诗人作品。但这些作品与粗俗的描述并存，这些描述依然令人震惊。很久以前，据说是彼得·德·布卢瓦所作的《维内里》，一开始描述的是一场浪漫的邂逅；但很快，它就变成了令人不安的性侵犯描述：

The noble sentiments of courtly love, which would soon infiltrate poetry and song throughout Europe, are occasionally found in the Goliards’ lyrics, some of which predate the earliest troubadour works. But these coexist alongside coarser descriptions that have not lost their ability to shock. Grates ago Veneri, attributed to Peter of Blois, starts out describing a romantic encounter; but soon it turns into a disturbing description of a sexual assault:

我大胆地使用武力……

With overboldness I use force…

她盘起身子，双膝交叉，以防止

自己的处女之门被打开……

She coils herself and entwines her knees to prevent the

door of her maidenhead from being unbarred…

我紧紧抓住她的手臂，狠狠地吻她。就这样，

维纳斯的宫殿被打开了^。23

I pin her arms, I implant hard kisses. In this way

Venus’ palace is unbarred.²³

此处原文为拉丁文，这无疑限制了这类抒情诗的受众。然而，我们不得不得出结论，类似的冒犯性作品必定在欧洲的本土语言中流传——它们构成了那一大批从未被后世传承下来的世俗抒情诗的一部分。

Here the original text is in Latin, and this would have limited the audience for such lyrics. Yet we can’t help but conclude that similarly offensive works must have circulated in the vernacular languages of Europe—part of that vast body of secular lyrics never preserved for posterity.

一些学者认为，“ Goliard ”一词部分源于中世纪神学家皮埃尔·阿贝拉尔（Pierre Abélard，1079-1142）的名字。他悲惨的个人经历是本章结尾的恰当案例研究。如果不是因为他与阿让特伊（Héloïse d'Argenteuil）的丑闻而声名狼藉，阿贝拉尔如今或许会因其对经院哲学的贡献而备受推崇。考虑到当时私人行为很少成为广泛新闻，他们作为恋人的名声就更加引人注目。阿贝拉尔是一位才华横溢的年轻人，出身于布列塔尼贵族家庭。他在巴黎圣母院的大教堂学校学习，二十出头就成为了一位杰出的教师。他的情妇埃洛伊丝本身就是一位令人敬佩的学者——她精通拉丁语、希腊语和希伯来语，并且拥有出色的写作能力，这在当时的任何人都是罕见的，尤其对于一位非贵族出身的女性来说更是如此。阿贝拉尔在成为埃洛伊丝的情人之前曾是她的老师。

Some scholars believe that the word Goliard is drawn, in part, from the name of the medieval theologian Pierre Abélard (1079–1142), whose calamitous personal story serves as a fitting case study to close this chapter. Abélard would be esteemed today for his contributions to scholastic philosophy, if he wasn’t more famous for his scandalous affair with Héloïse d’Argenteuil. Their renown as lovers was all the more remarkable when one considers how seldom the doings of private individuals became widespread news in those days. Abélard was a brilliant young man from a noble Breton family. He studied at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame de Paris and established himself as an eminent teacher while still in his early twenties. His mistress, Héloïse, was a formidable scholar in her own right—her knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and skill in writing would have been rare in any individual of the time, but especially for a woman from outside the nobility. Abélard was her instructor before becoming her lover.

“我们以学习为借口，完全沉溺于爱情，”阿贝拉尔后来在回忆他们的恋情时写道。“简而言之，我们的欲望让性爱的各个阶段都变得淋漓尽致，如果爱情能够设计出“对于新事物，我们表示欢迎。”爱洛伊丝怀孕生下了一个儿子。两人秘密结婚，但她的叔叔仍然对他侄女的耻辱感到不满，并寻求报复，而阿贝拉尔不愿公开承认爱洛伊丝是他的妻子，这加剧了叔叔的愤怒。一名仆人受贿，允许袭击者进入阿贝拉尔的卧室，在那里，他们“对我实施了残酷的报复，其残忍程度之高令人震惊，令全世界震惊；他们切掉了我犯下他们所抱怨的罪行的身体部位。”故事的结局是，埃洛伊丝宣誓成为修女，并最终晋升为修道院院长；而阿贝拉尔则隐居僧侣，偶尔也隐居。他继续传教和写作，但却屡屡面临异端指控，直至去世。这并非好莱坞为爱情故事选择的结局，而是一个适合维护公共秩序和道德的人们的结局^。24

“With our lessons as pretext, we abandoned ourselves entirely to love,” Abélard later wrote in his account of their affair. “In short our desires left no stage of love-making untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it.” Héloïse became pregnant and gave birth to a son. The couple were married secretly, but her uncle still bore a grievance for his niece’s dishonor and sought revenge, his anger aggravated by Abélard’s unwillingness to admit publicly that Héloïse was his wife. A servant was bribed to allow assailants entry to Abélard’s sleeping quarters, and there they “took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.” The denouement finds Héloïse taking vows as a nun and eventually rising to the rank of abbess, while Abélard retreats to the life of a monk and occasionally a hermit. He continued to teach and write, but faced repeated charges of heresy that followed him until his death. This is not the ending Hollywood would have chosen for a love story, but one suitable for the purposes of those upholding public order and morality.²⁴

然而，音乐史学者会对阿贝拉尔关于这段恋情的描述中一段颇具启发性的坦白尤其感兴趣。“现在，我越沉迷于这些乐趣，”他谈到自己对爱洛伊丝的热爱时说道，“我投入到哲学的时间就越少……即使灵感来了，也是为了写情歌，而不是哲学的奥秘。”鉴于当时和当地流传下来的世俗歌曲数量稀少，这一揭示值得关注，但更引人入胜的是这位哲学家接下来的评论。“正如你所知，这些歌曲中的很多至今仍在许多地方广为流传，尤其是那些欣赏我这种生活方式的人。”为了避免有人将这些歌曲的名声归咎于阿贝拉尔的虚荣心，爱洛伊丝在一封她自己尚存的信中证实了他的说法。她写信给她的前情人：

Yet the student of music history will be especially intrigued by a revealing admission in Abélard’s account of the affair. “Now the more I was taken up with these pleasures,” he relates in regard to his passion for Héloïse, “the less time I could give to philosophy… and when inspiration did come to me, it was for writing love-songs, not the secrets of philosophy.” Given the paucity of surviving secular songs from this time and place, the revelation is worthy of note, but even more fascinating is the philosopher’s next comment. “A lot of these songs, as you know, are still popular and sung in many places, particularly by those who enjoyed the kind of life I led.” Lest anyone ascribe the fame of these songs to Abélard’s vanity, Héloïse validates his claim in a surviving letter of her own. She writes to her former lover:

阿贝拉尔那些在他们那个时代闻名的歌曲竟然未能流传下来，至少没有明确的出处，这着实令人匪夷所思，尤其考虑到这位学者保存下来的文本多达约一百万字，足以堆满一个图书馆的书架。难道这些手稿中就没几句情歌——尤其是那些在今天看来堪称热门的歌曲——就那么几首吗？但我们从中汲取了一个重要的教训：音乐的真正历史，在“文盲”（借用埃洛伊丝的说法）群体中蓬勃发展时，往往被人们所忽视，而敏锐的研究者往往必须超越那些已被认可的文本，像侦探在犯罪现场一样，根据零星的线索和暗示，重构过去的事件。当我们试图揭开阿贝拉尔在世时，由法国南部的游吟诗人所掀起的西方歌曲伟大革命的起源时，这一点将变得尤为明显^。26

The fact that Abélard’s famous (in their day) songs have not survived, at least not with any clear attribution to him, is extraordinary, especially when we consider that this scholar’s preserved texts amount to around one million words and could fill a library shelf. Was there no room in all these manuscripts for a few love lyrics—especially songs that were so popular that today we would describe them as hits? But we learn an important lesson from this fact: namely, that the real history of music, as it flourished among the “unlettered” (to borrow Héloïse’s term), is often hidden from view, and the perspicacious researcher must often go beyond the sanctioned texts and reconstruct past events—almost like a detective at the scene of a crime—from stray clues and dropped hints. That will become especially evident as we try to unlock the origins of the great revolution in Western song unleashed during Abélard’s own lifetime, by the troubadours in the south of France.²⁶

11

11

压迫与音乐创新

Oppression and Musical Innovation

我们熟知源自非洲的音乐创新。一个多世纪以来，这一直是流行音乐叙事的主线，非洲奴隶后裔的贡献在每个年代都改写了商业歌曲的规则。从拉格泰姆到嘻哈，乃至更远的未来，以及其间的各种发展阶段，非裔美国音乐家一直扮演着创造性颠覆者的角色，他们让父母们感到震惊和愤怒，却让年轻人感到欣喜，并为热门歌曲和热门创作者树立了标准。一路走来，黑人创新者为每一代人奠定了音乐基调，有时他们还能长寿，见证他们备受争议的歌曲进入全球文化的主流。这是我作为一名听众的音乐生涯的故事，或许也是你的故事。

We are familiar with musical innovations coming out of Africa. For more than a century, that’s been the main plot in the narrative of popular music, with contributions from the descendants of African slaves rewriting the rules of commercial songs in every decade. From ragtime to hip-hop and beyond, with all the stopping points in between, African American musicians have played the role of creative disruptors, outsiders who shock and outrage parents but delight youngsters and set the standards for hits and hit-makers. Along the way, black innovators have established the soundtrack for each new generation, and sometimes have lived long enough to see their controversial songs enter the mainstream of global culture. This has been the story of my musical life as a listener, and probably yours as well.

但很少有人意识到，过去也发生过类似的过程，并且对西方歌曲的传统产生了同样颠覆性的影响。即使在最不可能发生的环境中——中世纪晚期的法国贵族中——也发生了一场音乐革命，其灵感来源于来到欧洲的奴隶们的丑陋歌曲。来自北非和中东。在这里，我们以最鲜明的方式看到了音乐创新的反复出现的模式：被鄙视的局外人创造了一种大胆的新歌唱方式，然后强大的内部人士介入，掌控了这种挑衅性的表演风格。并且往往以此居功自傲。接下来是不可避免的掩盖，官方历史记载否认这种文化交流曾经发生过。

But few realize that a similar process has taken place in the past, and with the same disruptive impact on the conventions of Western song. Even in the least likely setting—among the nobles of France in the late medieval period—a musical revolution took place that drew on the scandalous songs of slaves who came into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East. Here we see the recurring pattern of musical innovation in the starkest terms: the despised outsider creates a bold new way of singing, and then the powerful insider steps in to take control of this provocative performance style. And often to take credit for it as well. Then comes the inevitable cover-up, with the official historical accounts denying that this cultural transaction ever happened.

在这种情况下，名声和荣耀归于游吟诗人，他们是法国南部的贵族，因发明了用白话文演唱的世俗歌曲而受到赞誉，这是西方音乐获得解放的时刻，他们摆脱了教士干预的枷锁，音乐终于可以表达最私密的思想和情感。根据传统说法，这个故事的英雄是阿基坦公爵威廉九世，他被誉为第一位游吟诗人。他是一位创新者，为接下来的一千年西方歌曲定下了基调，即使在今天，西方歌曲仍然带有这场音乐革命的鲜明印记。游吟诗人这个词仍然用来形容创作歌手，意思是“发现者”或“发现者”——暗示这些有远见的人创造了一种全新的歌唱方式，这种方式的特点是音调更个性化，对内心生活更加敏感。

In this instance, fame and glory accrue to the troubadours, those nobles of southern France who are given credit for the invention of secular song in the vernacular language, a moment of liberation for Western music when the chains of clerical interference were thrown off and music was finally allowed to express the most intimate thoughts and feelings. The hero of this story, according to conventional accounts, is William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, acclaimed as the first troubadour. He is the innovator who set the tone for the next thousand years of Western song, which even today bears the unmistakable stamp of this musical revolution. The very word troubadour, still used to describe a singer-songwriter, translates as a “finder” or “discoverer”—implying that these visionaries created a whole new way of singing marked by a more individualistic tone and a deeper sensitivity to the inner life.

如今，我们理所当然地认为歌曲是个人表达的载体，而非实现制度目标的工具。我们钻研歌曲，期望找到歌者，而歌曲的揭示越是坦白和私密，我们就越感到欣慰。然而，一位权势显赫的公爵，欧洲最富有的人之一，竟然是促成这一切的催化剂，这是多么不可思议。贵族成员真的比平民更能体会自己的情感吗？他们真的能体验到更强烈的情感，承受着更多爱的痛苦吗？然而，如果我们相信CS·刘易斯（他在其开创性著作《爱的寓言》中分析了这一文化转折点）的观点，威廉九世及其追随者的影响远超音乐，甚至定义了至今仍存在的浪漫主义概念。“他们带来的改变，无不触及我们伦理道德、想象力和日常生活的方方面面。”刘易斯感叹道：“与这场革命相比，文艺复兴不过是文学表面的一道涟漪。” ¹

In the current day, we simply take it for granted that songs are vehicles of personal expression, not tools for achieving institutional objectives. We look into the song and expect to find the singer, and the more confessional and intimate the revelations, the more we are pleased. Yet how odd that a powerful duke, one of the wealthiest men in Europe, was the catalyst who made this happen. Are members of the nobility more in touch with their feelings than commoners? Do they experience stronger emotions and suffer more from the pangs of love? Yet if we believe C. S. Lewis, who analyzed this cultural turning point in his seminal book The Allegory of Love, William IX and his followers exerted an impact that went far beyond music, even defining the concept of romance as it persists today. “They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched,” Lewis exclaims. “Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.”¹

正如我们在上一章所见，在游吟诗人出现之前的几个世纪里，欧洲的农民妇女就用方言吟唱着关于爱情的伤感歌曲。如果这些歌词留存至今，我们就能判断贵族从这些前辈那里借鉴了多少。但即使基于目前提供的证据，我们仍然应该明智地将游吟诗人革命视为一个合法化的过程，而非创新，将其视为一个决定性的时刻，让那些曾经被审查和边缘化的歌唱方式找到了强大的拥护者，而这些拥护者是当局无法压制的。事实上，如今的歌手就是权威。

As we saw in the previous chapter, peasant women in Europe were singing scandalous songs about love in the vernacular for centuries before the troubadours. If the lyrics of these songs had survived, we could judge how much the nobility borrowed from these predecessors. But even on the evidence presented so far, we would be wise to consider the troubadour revolution as a process of legitimization rather than innovation, as the decisive moment when ways of singing previously censored and marginalized found powerful champions who could not be silenced by the authorities. Indeed, the singers now were the authorities.

不，吟游诗人并没有发明歌唱情感和内心世界的新方式——我们已经看到，代尔麦地那的埃及工匠比普罗旺斯的贵族们早两千年就做到了这一点。他们也没有发明浪漫的概念，即使是古人也知道并畏惧浪漫：他们的焦虑可以从他们将丘比特描绘成一个武装攻击者，其神箭甚至能制服最伟大的战士这一事实中体现出来。但我们仍然必须赞扬这些歌唱贵族改变了西方世界的音乐文化，因为他们树立了一个至今仍令我们着迷的迷人典范。我怀疑，我们自身的浪漫观念仍然受到吟游诗人歌词中弥漫的宫廷爱情态度的困扰。因此，即使威廉九世，这位在其时代以战士和诱惑者而闻名的君王，并没有发明情歌，他也确实赋予了它一种农民或奴隶无法传达的优雅和魅力。考虑到我们现代的平等主义原则，这在今天看来或许并不公平，但我们真的有那么大的不同吗？名人的恋情——即使是王子和公主的恋情——在我们这个时代，也难免引起人们的浓厚兴趣。正如一首耳熟能详的流行歌曲所说，我们或许永远无法成为皇室成员，但显然我们仍然对此抱有幻想。

No, the troubadours did not invent new ways of singing about emotions and the interior life—we have already seen how the Egyptian artisans of Deir el-Medina were doing that two thousand years before the nobles of Provence. Nor did they invent the concept of romance, which even the ancients knew and feared: their anxiety can be measured in the fact that they turned Cupid into an armed assailant whose arrows could subdue even the greatest warrior. But we still must give these singing nobles credit for transforming the musical culture of the Western world, for they set a beguiling example that still charms us in the present day. I suspect that our own notions of romance are still haunted by the attitudes of courtly love that permeate the troubadour lyrics. So even if William IX, known in his time as a warrior and seducer, did not invent the love song, he did impart an elegance and glamour to it that no peasant or slave could have conveyed. That may not seem fair to us today, given our modern egalitarian principles, but are we really so much different? The romances of celebrities—even of princes and princesses, where they still survive—do not fail to attract intense interest in our own time. We may never be royals, as the words of a familiar pop song tell us, but apparently we still fantasize about it.

但这些精力充沛的贵族们有值得效仿的榜样，而且不仅仅来自基督教世界。传统的关于游吟诗人的描述忽略了他们世俗化最重要的先例，以及歌曲的性感化。早在阿基坦国王威廉九世诞生数百年前，阿拉伯世界的女奴歌手就为欧洲树立了榜样。尽管巴格达是这种歌唱风格的中心，但在公元八世纪初穆斯林征服伊比利亚半岛后，这种歌唱风格才传遍北非，并传入欧洲。这些被称为“ qiyan”的奴隶歌手是音乐史上最鲜为人知的创新者。在整个中世纪时期，没有哪位表演者比他们更大胆，也没有哪位表演者比他们更能预见到后来音乐文化的变迁。然而，他们的贡献却一直被隐藏，即使在研究游吟诗人音乐起源的专门学术著作中也是如此。

But these lusty nobles had role models to follow, and not just from the Christian world. Traditional accounts of the troubadours ignore the most important precedent for their secularization and sensualization of song. Female slave singers from the Arab world set the example for Europe hundreds of years before the birth of William IX of Aquitaine. Although Baghdad served as the epicenter of this style of singing, it spread through North Africa and into Europe after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century. These enslaved singers, known as qiyan, are the least well-known innovators in the history of music. No performers of the entire medieval period were more daring, or anticipated the later shifts in musical culture with greater prescience. Yet their contributions have been hidden from view, even in specialized scholarly works on the origins of troubadour music.

一旦我们理解了奴隶在塑造我们音乐中的重要性，许多谜团便迎刃而解。例如，为什么我们的浪漫歌词如此频繁地依赖于束缚和奴役的意象？我们的求爱和浪漫观念怎么会与绳索、锁链以及《五十度灰》的意象联系在一起？这既怪诞，甚至令人毛骨悚然。然而，那些对恋物癖毫无兴趣的人却唱着自己是爱情的奴隶，似乎对这一概念背后痛苦而卑劣的历史浑然不觉。更奇怪的是，法国贵族们宣称自己是爱人的奴隶。公爵怎么会是奴隶？公爵怎么会假装是奴隶？但当我们明白发明这种唱法的人实际上是奴隶时，这种荒谬的演戏就完全说得通了。如今，爱情的奴役只是一个比喻；而在当时，它却是现实。

Once we grasp the significance of slaves in shaping our music, many mysteries are solved. For example, why do our romantic lyrics so often rely on images of bondage and servitude? How did our notions of courtship and romance ever get connected with ropes and chains and Fifty Shades of Grey imagery? This is bizarre and even a little creepy. Yet those with no taste for fetishism nonetheless sing that they are slaves to love, seemingly oblivious to the painful and debased history behind this concept. And it was even stranger when the nobles of France declared that they were slaves to their beloved. How could a duke be a slave? How can a duke even pretend to be a slave? But this ridiculous playacting makes perfect sense when we grasp that the people who invented this way of singing were actually enslaved. Today the slavery of love is a metaphor; back then it was reality.

我们之前在本书中就曾遇到过奴隶作为创新者，在接下来的篇幅中还会再次遇到。所以，或许现在是时候思考一下，为什么奴隶会对我们的音乐产生如此大的影响。希腊人用弗里吉亚和吕底亚奴隶的名字来命名他们最具颠覆性的调式，这仅仅是巧合吗？罗马人把奴隶带上舞台，在戏剧表演中演唱那些令人愉悦的歌曲，这仅仅是巧合吗？两千年后，南方种植园主也做了同样的事情，依靠受压迫的下层阶级的创造力和艺术才能来娱乐他们，这难道只是命运的安排吗？他们依靠什么？一系列奇怪的事件如何让社会中最脆弱、最受剥削的人成为音乐精英？

We have encountered slaves as innovators before in this book, and will do so again in the pages ahead. So perhaps this is a good time to ask why slaves have exerted so much influence on our music. Is it just happenstance that the Greeks named their most disruptive modes after their Phrygian and Lydian slaves? Is it mere coincidence that the Romans brought slaves onstage to deliver the crowd-pleasing songs in their theatrical performances? Is it an accident of fate that, two thousand years later, southern plantation owners did the same thing, relying on the creativity and artistry of an oppressed underclass for their musical entertainment? By what strange series of events do the most vulnerable and exploited people in a society emerge as a musical elite?

在这些环境中，奴隶只有一个优势，但至少从创造力和艺术创新的角度来看，这是一个巨大的优势。奴隶是局外人，正因如此，他们不效忠于周围社会的传统和价值观。歌曲的突破总是需要打破现状的意愿，而富人和权贵最不可能做到这一点——这就是为什么当历史记载将颠覆性的音乐作品归功于政治或宗教领袖（所罗门王、教皇格里高利、孔子、威廉九世公爵）时，我们应该始终保持怀疑。局外人几乎总是催化剂，是音乐DNA中新基因的载体。在大多数情况下，奴隶还会从遥远的土地带来特定的音乐技能和知识，以及不同的表演方式，这些都将丰富束缚他们的文化。最后，奴隶被赋予了统治者所不具备的一项自由：他们被期望犯罪，偏离榜样必须遵守的、具有侵入性的道德准则，尤其是在性方面。以阿拔斯王朝早期的“齐亚恩”（qiyan）为例，其历史至少可追溯到公元八世纪。这些女奴被允许在公共场合自由活动，无需遮盖面部；她们可以穿着色彩鲜艳的服装，而不是“体面”女性所规定的宽松深色服装；她们可以与男性调情，并拥有婚外情。这些自由的代价是沉重的。在其他方面，“齐亚恩”没有任何权利；她们可以被卖给出价最高的人，或被迫卖淫。但她们游离于主流规范之外的地位赋予了她们艺术上的自由，确保她们的歌曲拥有任何文化圈内人士都无法比拟的新鲜感和大胆。最终，这些自由人学会了模仿这些歌曲，但这需要奴隶的指引。

The slave has only one advantage in these settings, but it is a huge advantage, at least from the standpoint of creativity and artistic innovation. The slave is the outsider, and for this simple reason has no allegiance to the conventions and values of the surrounding society. Breakthroughs in song always require a willingness to disrupt the status quo, and the rich and powerful are the least likely people to do this—which is why we should always be suspicious when historical accounts give credit to a political or religious leader (King Solomon, Pope Gregory, Confucius, Duke William IX) for paradigm-changing musical works. The outsider is almost always the catalyst, the carrier of new genes in the musical DNA. In most cases, slaves also bring specific musical skills and knowledge from remote lands, different ways of performance that will enrich the culture that holds them in bondage. Finally, the slaves are granted one freedom not allowed to the rulers: they are expected to sin, to deviate from the intrusive moral rules that role models must obey, especially in sexual matters. In the case of the qiyan of the early Abbasid era, who date back at least to the eighth century AD, these female slaves were allowed to move about in public without covering their faces; they could wear colorful clothing instead of the loose-fitting dark garments prescribed for ‘respectable’ women; they could engage in flirtatious banter with men and have affairs. These freedoms came at a heavy price. In other matters, the qiyan had no rights; they could be sold to the highest bidder or forced into prostitution. But their position outside the prevailing norms gave them artistic license, ensuring that their songs would have a freshness and audacity that no cultural insider could match. Eventually the freeborn learned to imitate these songs, but only after the slave showed the way.

任何想要理解中世纪晚期西方音乐革命的人都必须理解这一动态。否则，将歌曲变成个人表达平台的制度束缚的放松将完全误解了。一位强大的公爵并没有赋予这种浪漫（和性）表达的自由；他只是承认了它既有的艺术力量，并给予了官方认可，仅仅因为他想亲身体验一下。同样，这种概念上的飞跃——让我们将奴隶和外来者视为音乐革命催化剂的飞跃——证明了对歌曲颠覆性历史的迫切需求。我们在本书中赞美外来者，并非为了追求前卫或摆出一副时髦的修正主义姿态，而是因为一个简单的原因，这些人一次又一次地推动了我们共同的音乐生活发生重大转变。是他们让我们的旧歌焕然一新。我们应该心存感激，至少应该对他们赋予我们的自由给予应有的赞誉——考虑到他们自己享受的自由是多么的有限，这种认可总是带着一丝悲剧性的讽刺。

Anyone who hopes to comprehend the revolution that took place in Western music in the late medieval period must grasp this dynamic. The loosening of the institutional strictures that turned song into a platform of personal expression will otherwise be completely misunderstood. A mighty duke did not grant that freedom of romantic (and sexual) expression; he merely recognized its already-existing artistic power and gave it official sanction, if only because he wanted a taste of it himself. By the same token, this conceptual leap—a leap that allows us to see slaves and outsiders as catalysts for musical revolution—testifies to the pressing need for a subversive history of song. We celebrate outsiders in these pages not to be edgy or to adopt a fashionable revisionist pose, but for the simple reason that these individuals are, again and again, the people who cause the major shifts in our shared musical lives to take place. They are the ones who make our old songs new again. We ought to be grateful and, at a minimum, give them proper credit for the freedoms they have granted us—an acknowledgment always tinged with tragic irony, given how little freedom they enjoyed themselves.

阿拉伯世界的奴隶歌手传统早于伊斯兰教的兴起。即使在更早的时期，奴隶群体也是一种多元文化的融合，其中包括波斯人、埃塞俄比亚人、埃及人和拜占庭人等等。这种多元文化环境所产生的音乐视角的碰撞，常常成为新歌唱方式的基石。圣经中关于巴别塔的神话警示我们，地球上各种语言的交融会导致冲突和混乱——即使在这个即时数字翻译的时代，许多人或许仍然相信这一点——但我们对这些大熔炉社会的历史认知，在音乐方面却给了我们相反的教训。当不同的种族和民族近距离共存时，音乐就会蓬勃发展。只要列出在港口城市和边境社区盛行的音乐类型，无论我们谈论的是新奥尔良、利物浦、金斯敦、哈瓦那、威尼斯，还是在当前的情况下，阿基坦的威廉九世的领地，其领土延伸到现在的西班牙边界，在那些日子里，穆斯林音乐实践和世俗歌曲的女歌手蓬勃发展。

The tradition of slave singers in the Arab world predates the rise of Islam. The slave population, even in this earlier period, was a multicultural mix that included Persians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, and Byzantines, among others. The clash of musical perspectives produced by such multicultural settings has often served as a foundation for new ways of singing. The biblical myth of the Tower of Babel warns us that the intermingling of our planet’s varied languages leads to conflict and confusion—and many perhaps still believe this today, even in an age of instantaneous digital translation—but our historical knowledge of these melting-pot societies teaches us the opposite lesson when it comes to music. When different races and ethnic groups coexist in close proximity, the music flourishes. Just make a list of the music genres that came to prominence in port cities and border communities, whether we are talking about New Orleans, Liverpool, Kingston, Havana, Venice, or, in the current instance, the domain of William IX of Aquitaine, whose territories extended to the boundary of current-day Spain, where, in those days, Muslim musical practices and female singers of secular songs flourished.

随着伊斯兰教的传播及其军事胜利，阿拉伯世界的奴隶音乐家的数量和多样性都得到了提升。我们甚至还保留着一份拍卖目录的文本，其中区分了书中探讨了十几个不同地区女奴来源的利弊，赞扬柏柏尔人的“忠诚和活力”，警告努比亚人的“自我放纵和娇气”，并谴责阿比西尼亚人“不擅长唱歌和跳舞”。这些描述表明，音乐技能固然重要，但并非奴隶主所追求的唯一特质。与古今中外一样，大多数奴隶都以仆人或劳工的身份工作，通常在恶劣的环境中或从事有辱人格的职业。然而，在阿拔斯王朝早期，一些女奴利用她们的技能获得了舒适甚至有影响力的地位。唱歌和作诗是受人重视的才能，智慧和交谈能力也是如此，拥有这些令人向往的特质的人可能会获得其他无法获得的特权。然而，如果我们不认识到美貌和性感在这些女性在伊斯兰社会中所处的特殊地位中的重要性，那我们就错了。无论过去还是现在，音乐家的魅力有时是通过眼睛而不是耳朵来判断的。无论如何，到了九世纪，一种围绕女奴建立的真正的沙龙文化已经发展起来。尽管如今伊拉克的巴格达是其中心，但其文化影响力却波及整个穆斯林世界，甚至延伸至伊比利亚半岛^。2

With the spread of Islam and its military victories, both the number and diversity of slave musicians expanded in the Arab world. We even have the surviving text of an auction catalog that distinguishes the pros and cons of a dozen different geographical sources of female slaves, praising Berbers for their “fidelity and energy,” warning about the “self indulgence and delicacy” of Nubians, and condemning Abyssinians as “useless for singing and dancing.” As these descriptions make clear, musical skills were important, but hardly the only traits sought after by owners of human chattel. Most slaves, as in all times and places, worked as servants or laborers, often in abusive settings or degrading occupations. Yet a few slave women in the early Abbasid period parlayed their skills into positions of comfort or even influence. Singing and versifying were valued talents, as were wit and conversational ability, and those who possessed these desirable attributes might secure privileges otherwise unobtainable. Yet we would be led astray if we didn’t also recognize the importance of beauty and sensuality in the special position these women held in Islamic society. The appeal of a musician, then and now, was sometimes discerned by the eye rather than the ear. In any event, by the ninth century a true salon culture built around female slaves had developed. Although Baghdad in modern-day Iraq served as its epicenter, its cultural influence would be felt throughout the Muslim world and into the Iberian Peninsula.²

当男性参与这一文化转变时，他们在基督教和穆斯林世界都经常被贴上娘娘腔的标签——就像他们在希腊和罗马的异教文化中一样。在阿拉伯世界，我们经常发现在现存的文献中将重要的歌手描述为mukhannathun ，我们在第 9 章中简要介绍过这个群体，他们为后来的游吟诗人革命奠定了基础。如那里所述，mukhannathun是一个包罗万象的术语，通常翻译为“娘娘腔的男人”，在特定语境中，它可能涵盖任何不符合当时流行的男子气概观念的人。这些人经常面临歧视、惩罚和流放。这个标签的污名可以通过 9 世纪的一项严格规定来衡量，该规定指出，诬告某人是mukhannath应受二十下鞭刑——与同性恋或散布诽谤真正的信徒是犹太人的惩罚相同。然而，这些mukhannathun不仅在音乐领域受到推崇，但有大量证据表明，这些表演者的女性形象提高了她们的受欢迎程度。

When men participated in this cultural shift, they were often branded as effeminate in both the Christian and Muslim worlds—just as they had been in the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome. In the Arabic world, we frequently find important singers described in surviving texts as mukhannathun, a group we looked at briefly back in Chapter 9, and who helped lay the groundwork for the later troubadour revolution. As noted there, mukhannathun is a catch-all term, often translated as “effeminate men,” and in specific contexts it might encompass anyone who did not conform to prevailing notions of masculinity. These individuals often faced discrimination, punishment, and exile. The stigma of the label can be gauged by a ninth-century stricture noting that a false accusation claiming someone was a mukhannath should be disciplined with twenty lashes—the same penalty listed for homosexual intercourse or, for that matter, spreading the slander that a true believer was a Jew. Yet not only were these mukhannathun admired in the field of music, but there is considerable evidence that the feminine image of these performers enhanced their popularity.

这个故事讲述了歌手哈基姆的故事。他因晚年改用“穆坎纳图恩”（mukhannathun）的演唱风格而被儿子斥责。“闭嘴，无知的孩子！”哈基姆回应道，并指出他“六十年来一直以更具男子气概的风格演唱，却从未赚到过比我每天的面包更多的钱”，但自从他接受了更受欢迎的风格后，“赚的钱比你以前见过的都多”。另一段揭示真相的文字以这句热情洋溢的话语结束了对歌手达拉尔的赞美：“还有比这更伟大的东西！……任何听到这句话的人都会知道，这确实是穆坎纳图恩的作品！”如今的音乐爱好者不禁会想起各种音乐流派的追随者中弥漫着的对真实性的崇拜。就像布鲁斯歌手如果来自密西西比州而不是爱荷华州会更受欢迎，嘻哈歌手如果在郊区而不是市中心长大就会失去街头信誉一样，八世纪的穆斯林音乐家也因其被认为是女性化而获得了推动^。3

The story is told of the singer Hakim, who was denounced by his son for switching to the singing style of the mukhannathun in his old age. “Be quiet, ignorant boy!” Hakim responded, noting that he had performed in a more manly style “for sixty years, and never made more than my daily bread,” but after embracing the more popular style he “made more money than you’d ever seen before.” Another revealing text concludes its praise of the singer al-Dalāl with these enthusiastic words: “And there is something yet greater than that!… Anyone who hears this will know that it is by a mukhannath in truth!” A music fan today can’t help but be reminded of the cult of authenticity that permeates the followers of various genres. Just as blues singers are more celebrated if they hail from Mississippi instead of Iowa, or hip-hoppers lose their street cred when they grow up in suburbia and not the inner city, so did Muslim musicians of the eighth century get a boost from their perceived effeminacy.³

穆卡纳特（mukhannath）表演者复杂而矛盾的角色在图韦斯（Tuways）的生平故事中占据了中心位置。图韦斯常被誉为伊斯兰世界第一位伟大的音乐创新者。图韦斯是最早声名显赫的穆卡纳特歌手，但许多人惧怕他，认为他是个不祥之物。值得注意的是，他的名字出现在两句与音乐无关的谚语中。被命运诅咒的人有时会被描述为“比图韦斯更不幸”，而类似的说法则会将举止优雅的人称为“比图韦斯更娘娘腔”。这些联想似乎并未损害他作为歌手的声望，尽管他的声誉中存在明显的代沟。老一辈的统治阶级不认可他的表演，而年轻男性则被这种新的演唱方式所吸引——我们大多数人都亲身经历过这种代沟。也许我们并不惊讶于早期伊斯兰社会中出现这种老年人与年轻人之间的冲突，但音乐创新与性的联系以及对“另类”生活方式的公开炫耀，让我们感受到历史与现代之间的差距有多么大。现实情况以及关于传统社会对音乐的态度的普遍假设^。4

The complex and contradictory role of the mukhannath performer comes to the forefront in the life story of Tuways, who is often celebrated as the first great musical innovator of the Islamic world. Tuways was the earliest renowned mukhannath singer, but many feared him as a jinx, a man of ill-omen. It’s worth noting that his name appears in two proverbs that have nothing to do with music. A person cursed by destiny was sometimes described as “more unlucky than Tuways,” while a similar saying would brand a man with delicate manners as “more effeminate than Tuways.” These associations seem to have done little to hurt his popularity as a singer, although a marked generational divide could be seen in his reputation. The older ruling class disapproved of his performances, while young men were drawn to this new way of singing—a divide that most of us know from firsthand experience. Perhaps we aren’t surprised to see this conflict between old and young showing up in early Islamic society, but the connection of musical innovation with sexuality and the open flaunting of an ‘alternative’ lifestyle give us a sense of just how large the gap is between historical reality and prevailing assumptions about the attitudes of traditional societies toward music.⁴

这一差距在有关阿布·努瓦斯的权威叙述中也很明显，他是阿拉伯古典文学中伟大的酒歌大师。他的历史重要性不容忽视，但埃及文化部在 2001 年焚烧了他的六千册诗集，原因是其中涉及同性恋主题，而这位音乐创新者的其他作品也被禁止出版——显然是因为在他去世 12 个世纪后，这些作品过于火爆，令人难以接受。由沙特阿拉伯政府资助的三十卷权威参考书《全球阿拉伯百科全书》对他的一生进行了高度美化的描述。当局不能忽视他，但也不能按照他自己的意愿接受他。这些干预有力地证明了音乐中颠覆性的主角在一千多年后仍然能够震撼听众，同时也让我们得以一窥历史是如何被重新诠释以适应他们的合法化的。几个世纪已经过去了，但虚假宣传活动仍有增无减——那些相信受批准账户的人往往在不知不觉中协助了这种宣传。

This gap is also evident in the authorized narrative about Abū Nuwās, the great master of wine songs in classical Arabic literature. His historical importance cannot be dismissed, but the Egyptian Ministry of Culture burned six thousand copies of his poetry in 2001 because of its homoerotic themes, while other works of this musical innovator were blocked from publication—apparently too hot to handle twelve centuries after his death. The Global Arabic Encyclopedia, an authoritative thirty-volume reference funded by the Saudi Arabian government, offers a highly sanitized account of his life. Authorities can’t ignore him, but neither can they accept him on his own terms. These interventions offer powerful testimony to how much subversive protagonists in music can still shock listeners more than a millennium later, but they also give us a glimpse into the ways history is reinterpreted to accommodate their legitimization. Centuries may have passed, but the disinformation campaign continues unabated—often unwittingly assisted by those who put their trust in the sanctioned accounts.

我上面提到，奴隶和穆坎纳图恩作为局外人享有一种奇特的自由，可以歌唱原本可能被视为禁忌的话题。但即使是他们也必须小心避免政治主题或针对统治阶级的讽刺。针对其他艺人的侮辱和嘲笑是被允许的，甚至可能是被鼓励的，但既定制度，尤其是奴隶制本身，却不能受到攻击。面对这样的限制，个人问题总是会取代政治问题。研究奴隶和其他受压迫群体歌曲的人已经学会了梳理出其中的暗语含义。亨利·路易斯·盖茨引入了“意指”（signifying）一词来概括这种做法，并指出了非裔美国文化中暗语交流的许多共同要素，但令人惊讶的是，在伊斯兰qiyan的歌曲、诗歌和轶事中也发现了许多相同的特征。在这里，我们遇到了骗子的恶作剧态度、程式化的谩骂和带有偏见的言辞、傲慢的不敬、刺激和挑衅的欲望、对社区标准的藐视，以及有时甚至会说出令人震惊的粗言秽语。例如，奴隶歌手 伊南（Inan）在喝了很久的酒，又经历了一场不尽人意的性爱之后，用下面这首歌来回应：

I mentioned above that slaves and mukhannathun enjoyed a strange kind of freedom as outsiders to sing of subjects that might otherwise be taboo. But even they had to be careful to avoid political themes or satires aimed at the ruling class. Insults and ridicule directed at other entertainers were allowed, perhaps even encouraged, but the established institutions, and especially slavery itself, could not be attacked. In the face of such strictures, the personal always becomes a substitute for the political. Those studying the songs of slaves and other oppressed groups have learned to tease out coded meanings. Henry Louis Gates introduced the term signifying to encompass this practice and identified a number of common ingredients of coded communication within African American culture, but it’s surprising how many of the same features are found in the songs, poems, and anecdotes of the Islamic qiyan. Here we encounter the mischievous attitudes of the trickster, the stylized use of invective and loaded meanings, a brash irreverence, a desire to goad and provoke, a flaunting of community standards, and sometimes shocking profanity. Take, for example, the response of the slave singer  Inan, who responded with the following song after a long bout of wine drinking and unsatisfying lovemaking:

没有什么爱人的快乐是得不到的。

There is no pleasure in a lover that is unattainable.

哦，众多的恋人，爱情是多么可恶啊

O host of lovers, how execrable is love

如果情人的阴茎有松弛的情况。

if there is flabbiness in the lover’s prick.

这里暗示的权力动态使这种情绪超越了肤浅的庸俗。在其他场合，观点毫无影响力的女人，却利用了情人的床这个唯一领域，在那里，她的判断被征求，甚至被恐惧。亲密的表达成为了被禁止的抱怨方式的替代品^。5

The power dynamic hinted at here raises such sentiments above shallow vulgarity. The woman whose views have no influence in other settings takes advantage of the one sphere, the lovers’ bed, where her judgments are solicited and even feared. Intimate expression serves as surrogate for prohibited modes of complaint.⁵

长期以来，学者们忽视或轻视伊斯兰歌曲对欧洲表演者的影响，但越来越多的证据让我们无法否认伊斯兰歌曲是通过北非和伊比利亚半岛传入法国的。埃兹拉·庞德早在 1923 年就通过其《第八章》中的一句精辟的诗句预见了这一假设，他在那句诗中断言阿基坦的威廉“将歌曲从西班牙带了出来/伴随着歌手和小提琴”。庞德在宾夕法尼亚大学读研究生期间一直专注于游吟诗人，诗人的父亲将他关于这个主题的著作《浪漫的精神》提交给英语系主任，希望它能满足论文要求并为儿子获得博士学位。系主任费利克斯·谢林是伊丽莎白抒情诗的专家，他断然拒绝了这一请求——回想起来，这是一个糟糕的举动。但即使是庞德也无法预料到，牛津大学学生塞缪尔·斯特恩在1948年发现了一个惊人的秘密：他发现11世纪希伯来语和阿拉伯语歌词中看似不连贯的诗句，实际上是用一种罗曼语方言写成的。就在几年前，西班牙音乐学家费利佩·佩德雷尔还宣称“我们的音乐没有受到阿拉伯音乐的影响”，但现在，数十首经过重新诠释的歌词，却揭示了多元文化交融的影响。更引人注目的是，斯特恩翻译的歌词强调了强烈的个人情感，而当时，方言歌曲这类诗歌在基督教世界里没有记录。最可能的解释是，阿拉伯文本借鉴了当时在伊比利亚半岛流传的流行歌词——很可能与教会领袖几个世纪以来反复攻击的歌词类似^。6

Scholars long ignored or minimized the influence of Islamic songs on European performers, but the mounting evidence no longer allows us to reject a path of dissemination through North Africa and via the Iberian Peninsula into France. Ezra Pound anticipated this hypothesis back in 1923 via a perspicacious line from his Canto VIII, where he asserted that William of Aquitaine “brought the song up out of Spain / with the singers and viels.” Pound had focused on the troubadours during his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, and the poet’s father submitted his book on the subject, The Spirit of Romance, to the chair of the Department of English, in hopes it would fulfill the dissertation requirement and secure a PhD for his son. The department chair, Felix Schelling, an expert in the Elizabethan lyric, dismissed the request out of hand—a poor move, in retrospect. But even Pound had no way of anticipating the extraordinary discovery made in 1948 by an Oxford student, Samuel Stern, who found that apparently incoherent lines in eleventh-century Hebrew and Arabic lyrics were actually in a vernacular Romance language. Just a few years earlier, Spanish musicologist Felipe Pedrell had declared that “our music has absorbed no influence from the Arabs,” but now dozens of lyrics, newly reinterpreted, revealed a multicultural mingling of influences. Even more striking, the lyrics Stern translated emphasized intense personal feelings at a time when vernacular songs of this sort went unrecorded in the Christian world. The most likely interpretation was that the Arabic texts drew on popular lyrics that were circulating in the Iberian Peninsula—probably similar to the very ones the church leaders had repeatedly attacked over the centuries.⁶

随后，在20世纪60年代，十三世纪阿拉伯诗人艾哈迈德·蒂法希（Ahmad al-Tifashi）的一份残篇文献被曝光，他探讨的是同性恋主题。蒂法希认为，生活在游吟诗人运动初期的安达卢西亚阿拉伯学者阿维姆佩斯（Avempace）“将基督教歌曲与东方歌曲融合，从而创造出一种安达卢斯独有的风格，安达卢斯人的气质偏向这种风格，以至于他们排斥所有其他风格。” 结论显而易见：这种歌颂强烈个人情感的“融合”音乐不仅存在，而且在西方世界最多元文化的社会中，它代表了最受欢迎的歌曲。这正是游吟诗人革命发生的平台^。7

Then, in the 1960s, a fragmentary document came to light from Ahmad al-Tifashi, a thirteenth-century Arabic poet who dealt with homoerotic themes. Al-Tifashi credits the Andalusian Arabic scholar Avempace, who lived during the first stirrings of the troubadour movement, with having “combined the songs of the Christians with those of the East, thereby inventing a style found only in Andalus, toward which the temperament of its people inclined, so that they rejected all others.” The conclusion is inescapable: this ‘fusion’ music that celebrated intense personal emotions not only existed, but represented the most popular songs in the most intensely multicultural society in the Western world. This is the platform on which the troubadour revolution took place.⁷

我们知道，第一位游吟诗人之父威廉八世在西班牙战役中带回了数百名伊斯兰战俘。这些俘虏必定带着他们的音乐——他们总是这样，歌曲和民间传说是被奴役者唯一不可侵犯的财产——而这位游吟诗人抒情诗的未来“发明者”很可能在童年时期听过类似的歌曲，这些歌曲是由受过阿拉伯世界蓬勃发展的风格训练的基扬演唱的。他甚至可能学习过阿拉伯语。近年来，学者们甚至提出，他的一首抒情诗《Farai un vers》的现存版本中有几行是用阿拉伯语写的。无论如何，贵族们很快就从聆听这类世俗歌曲转向演唱。在这方面，他们效仿了阿拔斯王朝的精英，后者早在游吟诗人时代之前就模仿了奴隶歌手的语言。查理曼大帝时期的哈里发哈伦·拉希德，甚至被认为是一首抒情诗的作者，歌颂他与三位受宠的女奴的“奴役”。他宣称：“全人类都服从我，而我却受她们统治，她们却不肯臣服于我。” 他最后总结道：“这只能是爱的主权。” 这就是宫廷爱情的本质，但表达方式比吟游诗人的兴起早了三百年^。8

We know that William VIII, the father of the first troubadour, brought hundreds of Islamic prisoners back from his Spanish campaigns. These captives must have carried their music with them—they always do, songs and folklore are the only inviolable properties of those in bondage—and it is likely that the future ‘inventor’ of the troubadour lyric heard similar songs during his childhood performed by qiyan trained in the flourishing styles of the Arabic world. He may even have learned Arabic. In recent years, scholars have gone so far as to suggest that several lines in a surviving version of one of his lyrics, Farai un vers, are in that language. In any event, the nobility soon made the leap from listening to performing secular songs of this sort. In this regard, they followed the example of the Abbasid elite who had imitated the language of slave singers long before the troubadour era. The caliph Harun al-Rashid, who reigned during the time of Charlemagne, is even attributed as author of a lyric celebrating his ‘bondage’ to three especially favored slave women. “The whole of mankind obey me, while I am ruled by them and they submit not to me,” he declared, concluding: “It can only be the sovereignty of love.” This is the essence of courtly love, but expressed three hundred years before the rise of the troubadours.⁸

所有这些都发生在非洲音乐影响大范围从小范围传播到欧洲的背景下。例如，鲁特琴的起源，许多人认为它在中世纪晚期和文艺复兴时期是典型的西方乐器。这种乐器由摩尔人经西班牙传入欧洲，本质上是一种来自伊斯兰世界的乌德琴，但增加了琴格——这些琴格可以消除所有微分音弯曲，这对非洲音乐至关重要，但与毕达哥拉斯范式及其对纯粹标量音符的坚持不相容。事实上，鲁特琴的非欧洲起源反映在其名称上，可能源自阿拉伯语al  ud ，意为“木头制成”，也是乌德琴一词的来源。在可能是中世纪晚期最具影响力的歌曲集《圣母颂》中，我们发现了一幅有趣的图画，画中有两位琵琶演奏者，一位皮肤黝黑，另一位皮肤白皙，非洲人显然处于突出的位置，而他的基督教伴奏者似乎在旁观看并模仿他的同伴。

All of this took place in the context of a larger dissemination of musical influences from Africa to Europe in matters both small and large. Consider, for example, the origins of the lute, seen by many as the quintessential Western musical instrument during the late medieval era and Renaissance. This instrument was brought to Europe via Spain by the Moors, and is essentially an oud from the Islamic world, but with the addition of frets—the frets were required to eliminate all those microtonal bends, essential to African music but incompatible with the Pythagorean paradigm and its insistence on pure, scalar notes. In fact, the non-European origin of the lute is reflected in its name, likely derived from the Arabic al ud, signifying “made of wood,” and also the source of the word oud itself. In the Cantigas de Santa Maria, perhaps the most influential collection of songs from the late medieval period, we find an intriguing illustration of two lute players, one dark skinned and the other white, with the African clearly positioned in a place of preeminence while his Christian accompanist appears to be looking on and imitating his companion.

但我们几乎无需这些例证就能证明，外来者是当时南欧音乐教育的领军人物。当时的音乐教育中心是科尔多瓦，它是公元1000年欧洲人口最多的城市，约有50万居民，是当时巴黎或伦敦人口的十倍多。西班牙最著名的中世纪音乐教师是齐亚布——这个名字翻译过来就是“黑鸟”，表明了这位博学多识的著名学者的肤色，他可能是非洲人，或者是阿拉伯人和非洲人的混血儿。如果不是因为与老师伊斯哈格·毛西里（Ishaq al-Mawsili）的激烈竞争而被迫离开，齐亚布或许会在巴格达度过他的整个职业生涯。他曾在如今的叙利亚和突尼斯工作，之后定居科尔多瓦，并在那里创办了一所音乐学院，这所学校堪称当时的茱莉亚音乐学院。他的歌曲和鲁特琴演奏产生了深远的影响，但他的创新也延伸到了其他领域。领域也同样如此。他对饮食、时尚、发型设计和个人形象的影响力，充分证明了他享有的超级巨星地位。音乐史学家应该更多地关注这位开创性的人物。他将非洲和欧洲传统相融合，预示着音乐和其他领域的诸多发展。

But we hardly need such illustrations to prove that outsiders were the leading music teachers in southern Europe during this era. The center of music education at this juncture was Córdoba, which had the largest population of any European city in the year 1000, with around half a million residents—more than ten times as many inhabitants as Paris or London at that juncture. The most famous medieval music teacher in Spain was Ziryab—a name that translates as blackbird, and indicates the skin color of this celebrated polymath, who was probably either of African or mixed Arabic and African descent. Ziryab might have spent his entire career in Baghdad if a bitter rivalry with his teacher Ishaq al-Mawsili hadn’t forced his departure. He worked in present-day Syria and Tunisia before settling in Córdoba, where he established a music school that was the Juilliard of its day. His songs and lute-playing exerted a long-lasting influence, but his innovations extended into other areas as well. His influence on food, fashion, hair styling, and personal grooming testifies to the superstar status he enjoyed. Historians of music would do well to pay more attention to this seminal figure. His merging of African and European traditions anticipates many later developments in music and other spheres.

本章几乎完全聚焦于伊斯兰世界，但现在，当我们将目光转向欧洲时，我们将看到同样的主题和趋势在西方文化背景下清晰地浮现。尤其是，这个时代“乞言”歌曲中蕴含的奴役精神，将在欧洲获得一个新的名称。我们现在称之为“宫廷爱情”——一个非常优雅的称谓，用来形容奴隶在理想化的爱人面前卑躬屈膝的姿态。这个名称并非游吟诗人所创——“宫廷爱情”一词直到19世纪才出现。但它恰如其分地描述了他们歌词中优雅而程式化的态度。即便如此，奴役的痕迹仍然随处可见。“爱人总是卑微的，”CS刘易斯在他对这种影响深远的诗歌风格和求爱方式的综述中写道。 “服从他夫人最轻微的愿望，无论多么异想天开，默许她的责备，无论多么不公正，是他唯一敢于宣称的美德。”在这种新伪装下，奴役变得浪漫，甚至富有魅力^。9

My focus in this chapter has been almost exclusively on the Islamic world, but now, as we turn our attention to Europe, we will see the same themes and trends emerging with striking clarity in the context of Western culture. In particular, the ethos of servitude embedded in the qiyan songs of this era will get a new name in Europe. We now know it under the label of “courtly love”—a very elegant title for the submissive groveling of a slave before an idealized beloved. The troubadours didn’t come up with that name—the phrase “courtly love” doesn’t appear until the nineteenth century. But it aptly describes the graceful and stylized attitudes of their lyrics. Even so, the trappings of servitude are still apparent at every turn. “The lover is always abject,” C. S. Lewis notes in his survey of this influential poetic style and manner of courtship. “Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim.” Servitude, in this new guise, becomes romantic, even glamorous.⁹

西方文化史上，还有比这更强大的模因吗？有多少歌曲歌颂了恋人的求爱和对爱人的尊重？数不胜数。小说、短篇小说、戏剧、电影、诗歌、肥皂剧、音乐剧、漫画书以及其他所有叙事形式，都同样如此。即使吟游诗人没有发明通俗的爱情抒情诗，他们也取得了或许更令人印象深刻的成就。正如我们将在下一章看到的，他们汲取了农民、戈利亚德人、奴隶和其他受鄙视群体饱含情感的情感，并将其转化为骑士与美丽女士之间嬉戏玩闹的浪漫游戏。他们将爱情变成了一场充满骑士精神的奇观，展现了如画的风情万种的骑士风度。简而言之，他们创造了求爱的概念，以及所有与之风格化的态度。由此，他们定义了我们的幻想。未来一千年的生活。事实上，我们许多情色想象仍然沉浸在中世纪的装饰中，甚至比我们愿意承认的还要多。在谷歌上搜索“身披闪亮盔甲的骑士”，会得到千万条结果——其中大多数似乎描述的是对未来的憧憬，而非我们对过去的刻画。在我们集体心理的深层，我们既是被奴役的附庸，又是被捧上神坛的爱人。

Is there a more powerful meme in the history of Western culture? How many songs celebrate the courtship of the lover and deference to the beloved? There are too many to count. The same is true of novels, short stories, plays, movies, poems, soap operas, musicals, comic books, and every other form of narrative. Even if the troubadours didn’t invent the vernacular love lyric, they achieved something perhaps even more impressive. As we shall see in the next chapter, they took the emotion-filled sentiments of peasants, Goliards, slaves, and other despised groups and transformed them into a playfully romantic game of knights and lovely ladies. They turned love into a spectacle of picturesque and chivalrous behavior. In short, they created the concept of courtship, and all its stylized attitudes. In doing so, they defined our fantasy life for the next one thousand years. Indeed, much of our erotic imagination remains immersed in medieval trappings, more than we care to admit. A Google search for the term “knight in shining armor” comes back with ten million hits—most of them seemingly describing longings for the future rather than our characterization of the past. At some deep level of our collective psyches, we remain both the serving vassal and the put-on-a-pedestal beloved.

12

12

并非所有巫师都携带魔杖

Not All Wizards Carry Wands

如此强大的理念注定会像我们当代的语言一样迅速传播。即使在今天，我们也依然接受游吟诗人在表演中融入的音乐态度，这种态度始于11世纪末的法国南部。如今，我们只是简单地认为歌曲表达的是个人情感，尤其是关于爱情的感受，并且与歌手的个人经历和世界观交织在一起。但在游吟诗人崛起之前，这种观念只存在于欧洲音乐生活的边缘和阴影中，每当它们变得过于突出时，就会面临审查和强烈反对。如今，这种情况正在改变，首先是少数表演者，其中许多是贵族，但最终几乎所有其他人都会改变。我们应该将自己视为这些受益者之一。

Such a powerful idea was destined to go viral, as we would describe it in contemporary terms. Even today we embrace the musical attitudes the troubadours brought to their performances, starting in southern France during the late eleventh century. Nowadays we simply assume that songs express personal emotions, especially feelings about love, and that they are intertwined with the biography and worldview of the singer. But before the rise of the troubadours, such notions only existed on the fringes and in the shadows of musical life in Europe, facing censorship and backlash whenever they became too prominent. This now would change, first for a small number of performers, many of them nobles, but eventually for almost everyone else. We should count ourselves among these beneficiaries.

这种新歌唱方式的迅速传播，或许可以从最早的吟游诗人之一塞尔卡蒙（Cercamon）的名字中看出。他的笔名字面意思是“环游世界”。我们可以将他与最古老的吟游诗人阿基坦公爵威廉九世联系起来——塞尔卡蒙现存的作品之一是一首为公爵之子威廉十世创作的挽歌（planh ）。但他的旅行经历或许使他去过许多其他地方，甚至可能作为路易七世的追随者参加了第二次十字军东征。另一位著名的早期游吟诗人马卡布鲁可能是塞尔卡蒙的学生，他也带着他的艺术生涯踏上了征程，起初可能是一名吟游诗人（joglar），演唱他人创作的歌曲，后来成为自己作品的作曲家。我们在莱昂和卡斯蒂利亚国王阿方索七世的宫廷中听说过他，他作品的传播也因后世作家频繁提及他而得到证实。

The rapid spread of this new approach to song can perhaps be gauged by the name of one of the earliest troubadours, Cercamon, whose pseudonym literally translates as “circle-the-world.” We can connect him to the oldest troubadour, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine—one of Cercamon’s surviving works is a planh, or funeral lament, for the duke’s son, William X—but his travels may have brought him to many other locales, perhaps even on the Second Crusade as a follower of Louis VII. Marcabru, another prominent early troubadour, was probably a student of Cercamon’s, and he, too, took his craft on the road, perhaps at first as a joglar, a performer of songs created by others, and later as composer of his own works. We hear of him at the court of King Alfonso VII of León and Castile, and the spread of his work is testified by frequent references to him by later writers.

如果这些歌手的留存记录表明了游吟诗人艺术的地理覆盖范围，那么它们也更清楚地表明了它跨越阶级和特权障碍的惊人跨越。据说马卡布鲁是个私生子，但这并没有阻止他对贵族进行尖锐的抨击。出身低微的人现在有了谴责统治者的平台，尽管只能通过歌曲。贝尔纳特·德·文塔多恩是下一代游吟诗人中最杰出的一位，他的父亲是一个仆人——据说他甚至不是面包师，而只是一个收集木材并加热烤面包的烤箱的人。然而，他却大胆地为文塔多恩子爵的妻子唱情歌，甚至可能与她同床共枕。据说子爵本人也这么认为：他最终让一名卫兵监视他的妻子，并强迫这位多情的游吟诗人离开他的宫廷。

If the surviving accounts of these singers indicate the geographical reach of the troubadour art, they also make clear its even more impressive leap across barriers of class and privilege. Marcabru is said to have been a foundling of illegitimate birth, yet this didn’t prevent him from unloading scathing attacks on the nobility. The lowborn now had a platform for denouncing their rulers, if only via song. Bernart de Ventadorn, the most distinguished of the next generation of troubadours, was the son of a servant—not even a baker, we are told, but merely the person who gathered the wood and heated the oven where the bread was baked. Yet he was bold enough to sing love songs to the wife of the Viscount of Ventadorn, and perhaps even share her bed. The viscount himself allegedly thought so: he eventually put his wife under the watchful eye of a guard and forced the amorous troubadour to leave his court.

然而，在一份现存的文献中，伯纳特被描述为一位英俊的男子，他赢得了一位地位更高的女士——阿基坦的埃莉诺的青睐。埃莉诺拥有罕见的殊荣，同时担任英格兰和法国的王后。我们这位出身低微的吟游诗人甚至可能在1154年埃莉诺和她的丈夫亨利二世的加冕典礼上亲临威斯敏斯特教堂。如此重要的事业可以建立在情歌之上——而且没有一位吟游诗人比伯纳特·德·文塔多恩更虔诚、更热情地歌唱爱情——这不仅告诉我们这些歌曲在那个时期有多么珍贵，也告诉我们自查理曼大帝时代以来世界发生了多么深刻的变化。查理曼大帝在宫殿中教授格里高利圣咏，当他需要音乐家时，教皇会为他们提供。

But Bernart, described as a handsome man in a surviving text, found the favor of an even more exalted lady, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who possessed the rare distinction of serving as queen of both England and France. Our lowborn troubadour may even have been on hand in Westminster Abbey at the coronation of Eleanor and her husband Henry II in 1154. That a career of this magnitude could be built on love songs—and no troubadour sang about love with more devotion and passion than Bernart de Ventadorn—tells us not only how much these songs were valued during this period, but also how profoundly the world had changed since the time of Charlemagne, who had Gregorian chant taught in his palace, and when he was seeking musicians, had them supplied by the pope.

贵族们定下了基调，所有人都效仿他们。“如今，每个人——基督徒、犹太人、撒拉逊人、皇帝，“王子、国王、公爵、伯爵、子爵、外邦人、牧师、资产阶级、农民——无论大小，每个人都全心全意地歌唱和创作，”13 世纪早期的加泰罗尼亚游吟诗人雷蒙·维达尔抱怨道。“你很难发现自己身处如此私密或孤独的地方，周围人很少或很多，以至于你听不到某个人或其他人，或所有人一起唱歌；因为即使是最质朴的山间牧羊人，也能在歌声中找到最大的慰藉。”而且，这些歌曲比以往任何时候都更多地是关于歌手自己的——因为无论地位高低，音乐现在都成为了一种由情感驱动的自传的渠道^。1

The nobles set the tone, and everyone followed their example. “Now these days everyone—Christian, Jew, or Saracen, emperor, prince, king, duke, count, viscount, vavasseur, cleric, bourgeois, peasant—simply everyone great or small, is putting his whole heart into singing and composing,” complained Raimon Vidal, a Catalan troubadour of the early thirteenth century. “You could hardly find yourself in so private or solitary a place, with so few or so many persons, that you would not hear someone or other, or all together, singing; for even the most rustic shepherds of the mountains find their greatest solace in song.” And these songs, more than ever before, were about the singers themselves—for high and low, music now served as a channel for emotion-driven autobiography.¹

新的音乐规则不仅促进了自我表达，也为那些精通音乐的人创造了前所未有的名声。这标志着欧洲音乐文化的重大变革。中世纪时期，很大一部分艺术、文字和音乐作品都是匿名创作的。尽管创作这些作品的人并非完全默默无闻——像希尔德加德·冯·宾根、莱奥南和佩罗坦这样的作曲家我们耳熟能详——但我们丝毫不能预料到，针对游吟诗人的英雄崇拜是如此强烈。现存的文献中，大约有五百位游吟诗人被确认身份。我们几乎无法避免得出这样的结论：这种音乐的某些方面或本质，让听众觉得与创作者的个人特质密不可分。当音乐侍奉上帝时——几乎所有保存下来的中世纪早期歌曲都是如此——创作者们被他们技艺的更高目标所掩盖。如今，音乐颂扬着爱与荣耀，歌手成为了歌词的焦点，成为了每首歌曲的真正主题。此时，个人崇拜已融入西方音乐的 DNA，并一直延续至今，成为一代又一代歌手的主导基因，经受住了风格和流派的所有其他变化。

The new rules of music not only fostered self-expression, but also created an unprecedented degree of fame for those who excelled at it. This marks a major change in the musical culture of Europe. A significant portion of the art, writing, and music of the medieval period was produced anonymously, and though the silence surrounding the people who created these works was by no means absolute—composers such as Hildegard von Bingen, Léonin, and Pérotin are known to us by name—nothing prepares us for the hero worship directed at the troubadours. Some five hundred of them are identified in the surviving literature. We can hardly avoid the conclusion that some aspect or essence of this music struck its listeners as inseparable from the personalities of those who created it. When music served God—as was the case with almost every song preserved from the early medieval period—the humans who created it were obscured by the higher purpose of their craft. Now that music celebrated love and glory, the singer emerged as the focal point of the lyrics, the real subject of every song. At this juncture, the cult of personality entered the DNA of Western music, where it remains to this day, the dominant gene passed on to each new generation of singers, surviving all other changes of style and genre.

教会对此作何反应？一些牧师继续抨击这些流行歌曲的色情意味，但他们的禁令对当时的音乐品味已不再产生太大影响。另一个极端是，一些基督徒为了自身目的而采纳了游吟诗人的技艺。最突出的例子是圣方济各·阿西西，他创作的《太阳颂》是迄今为止最古老的……现存的意大利语白话抒情诗，明显模仿了他年轻时听到的吟游诗人歌词。方济各甚至称他的修士为“主的吟游诗人”（jongleurs of the Lord）——这与用来形容世俗歌曲表演者的词语“吟游诗人”（ jongleur，或minstrel）相同。但大多数回应都介于这两个极端之间，基督教与新音乐之间出现了一种不稳定的休战状态。

How did the church respond to this? A few priests continued to rail against the erotic tone of these popular songs, but their prohibitions no longer had much impact on the musical tastes of the day. On the other extreme, some Christians adopted the troubadour’s craft for their own purposes. The most prominent example is St. Francis of Assisi, whose Canticle of the Sun, the oldest surviving lyric in vernacular Italian, clearly imitates the troubadour lyrics he heard during his youth. Francis even referred to his friars as “jongleurs of the Lord”—adopting the same word, jongleur (or minstrel), used to describe performers of secular songs. But most responses fell between these two extremes, and an uneasy truce emerged between Christianity and the new music.

我认为，这种休战规则解释了歌词中蕴含的对性取向的矛盾态度。在这些歌曲中，我们一次又一次地发现，最热烈的性欲表达与对贞洁的呼吁并存。吟游诗人歌唱着他们纵欲的激情，却又否认自己想要付诸行动。这究竟是怎么回事？如今大多数读者会认为这不过是虚伪之举。我们所熟知的那些撩人歌曲不可避免地以诱惑为目的，因此我们很难理解他们心中还有其他目的。我们假设吟游诗人是在庆祝与爱人真正的性结合——否则，这还有什么意义呢？但这种态度反映出对游戏规则的根本误解——这不仅是对宫廷爱情规则的误解，也是对世俗与宗教力量之间暗中妥协的误解，正是这种妥协让这些音乐得以公开流传。

I believe that the rules of this truce explain otherwise paradoxical attitudes toward sexuality embedded in these lyrics. Again and again in these songs, we find the most heated expressions of sexual desire placed side by side with calls to chastity. Troubadours sing about their libidinous passions, and then deny they want to act on them. What’s going on here? Most readers nowadays will view this as little more than hypocrisy. The seductive songs we know about inevitably aim at seduction, so it’s hard for us to comprehend any other end in mind. We assume the troubadours were celebrating actual sexual union with the beloved—otherwise, what’s the point? But this attitude reflects a basic misunderstanding of the rules of the game—not just the dictates of courtly love, but also the implicit compromise between secular and religious forces that allowed this music to come out into the open.

吟游诗人革命建立在这样一种观点之上，用吟游诗人吉扬·德·蒙塔纳戈尔的话来说，“贞洁源于爱，因为如果一个人全心全意地渴望爱，他就不会做坏事。” 并非所有歌手都能践行这一理想，少数吟游诗人或许是惯犯。但这种失误可以被视为人性弱点的结果，因此并未推翻当时盛行的神学。事实上，如果没有接受一定程度的克制和基于规则的性欲秩序，吟游诗人的艺术就不可能蓬勃发展。值得注意的是，一些现存的最淫荡的歌词是献给贵妇或权贵之人的妻子的。如果我们将这些歌曲视为对通奸的呼唤，那就错了。恰恰相反，正是这些女性的遥不可及，才使她们成为此类歌曲的完美主题^。2

The troubadour revolution was built on the view that, in the words of troubadour Guilhem de Montanhagol, “from love chastity comes forth, for if a man aspires entirely to love he cannot then act badly.” Not every singer lived up to this ideal, and a few troubadours were perhaps chronic offenders. But such lapses could be viewed as a result of human weakness, and thus did not topple the prevailing theology. Indeed, the troubadour’s art could not have flourished if it hadn’t accepted a measure of restraint and rule-based ordering of sexual desire. It’s worth noting that some of the lustiest of the surviving lyrics were dedicated to noble ladies or the wives of powerful men. We deceive ourselves if we view these songs as calls to adultery. On the contrary, the very unattainability of these women made them the perfect subjects for such songs.²

但说实话。从长远来看，这种试图将情色歌词转化为道德说教工具的尝试注定会失败。性感歌曲并非灌输道德准则的良好平台——尽管即使在我们这个时代，专制政权也从未停止尝试。就在我写这篇文章的时候，中国共青团仍在发布魅力四射的男子组合TFBoys的视频，他们的歌曲赞美浪漫的乐趣，同时鼓励人们遵守党的路线。朝鲜努力打造韩国流行音乐的类似作品——例如，依靠魅力十足的玄松月演唱《我爱平壤》、《她是一名退伍士兵》或《我们是党的部队》等鼓舞人心的歌曲。然而，强硬派政权仍然没有找到如何在对情色音乐的需求与盛行教条的束缚之间取得平衡的方法。2015年，乌干达歌手杰米玛·坎西梅因在MV中用肥皂泡涂抹身体而入狱；2017年，埃及歌手希玛因在演唱歌曲《我有问题》时吃了一根香蕉而被捕。在大多数情况下，专制政权都认识到，面对音乐潮流，最好是妥协，找到双方都能有所取舍的共存之道。至少，正是这种妥协，使得中世纪晚期西方世界那些表达个人情感的世俗歌曲得以重见天日。即使休战协议无法维持，其对音乐的影响也是不可逆转的。从那时起，无论独裁者如何发号施令，音乐家们都会继续歌唱他们的爱情生活。

But let’s be honest. Over the long run, this attempt to turn lusty lyrics into a vehicle for moralizing was doomed to failure. Sexy songs are poor platforms for imposing ethical guidelines—although authoritarian regimes, even in our own day, haven’t stopped trying. Even as I write, the Communist Youth League in China continues to release videos by the attractive boy band TFBoys, whose songs celebrate the joys of romance while encouraging deference to the party line. North Korea strives to create K-Pop equivalents—for example, relying on the attractive Hyon Song-wol to sing uplifting songs, such as “I Love Pyongyang,” “She Is a Discharged Soldier,” or “We Are Troops of the Party.” Nonetheless, hardline regimes still haven’t figured out how to balance demand for erotic music with the strictures of prevailing dogma. In 2015, Ugandan singer Jemimah Kansiime found herself in jail for rubbing soapsuds over her body in a music video, and in 2017, an Egyptian vocalist, Shyma, was arrested after eating a banana while performing her song “I Have Issues.” In most instances, authoritarian regimes have learned, it’s best to bend in the face of musical trends, and find ways to coexist with a little give and take on both sides. At least that was the compromise that allowed secular songs of personal expression to come out of hiding in the Western world during the late medieval period. Even if the truce couldn’t survive, the impact on music was irreversible. From this point onward, musicians would continue to sing about their love lives, no matter what the dictators dictated.

女性在这场文化变迁中扮演了什么角色？至少，她们为新的歌唱方式奠定了基础。早期世俗歌曲的禁令一再将女性作为目标，使得女性“塞壬”歌曲作为冒险音乐典范的古老神话得以延续。即使在伊斯兰世界，这些歌曲获得了表达的空间，女性在表达渴望和欲望的音乐中也被认为占据着主导地位。从这个角度来看，所谓宫廷爱情的兴起应该被视为女性歌曲创作方式迟来的合法化。当然，这些歌曲本身建立在对女性的理想化之上，同时也隐含地接受了女性在所有与情感和亲密关系相关的事务中是裁判者和仲裁者的观点——在一个女性几乎不被赋予真正权力的文化中，这无疑是一种非同寻常的主张。这些歌词用来描述男人向女人求情的词语——“求婚者”提供的“求婚”——本身就我们向法官提出法律上诉时仍然适用这些原则。然而，当女性想要为自己的歌曲争取荣誉时，她们的权威似乎就终结了。在我们所知的这个时代歌手中，女性仅占5%，而女性吟游诗人创作的歌曲（被称为“trobairitz ”）只有大约24首流传至今，而男性吟游诗人创作的歌曲则有大约2600首。

What role did women play in this cultural shift? At a minimum, they laid the groundwork for the new way of singing. The prohibitions on secular songs in earlier periods had repeatedly targeted women, perpetuating the ancient mythology of the female ‘siren’ song as the epitome of risky music. And even when these songs were given scope for expression in the Islamic world, women were acknowledged as preeminent in the music of longing and desire. The rise of so-called courtly love, from this perspective, ought to be seen as the long overdue legitimization of a feminine approach to song. Certainly the songs themselves are built on an idealization of the feminine, as well as an implicit acceptance that women are the judges and arbiters in all matters relating to emotions and intimate relationships—an extraordinary claim in a culture that gave so little real power to females. The very words these lyrics used to describe a man’s intercession to a woman—a “suit” offered by a “suitor”—are the ones we still apply when making a legal appeal to a judge. Yet the woman’s authority apparently ended when she wanted credit for her own songs. Women account for just 5 percent of the singers we know by name from this era, and only around two dozen songs by female troubadours, known as trobairitz, have survived—in comparison with around 2,600 by men.

大多数吟游诗人仅以一首歌曲闻名，只有卡斯特洛萨和迪亚伯爵夫人留下了多首歌词。留存至今的传记信息非常少，大多数情况下，细节都强调了女性的贵族家庭或她们所认识和爱戴的权势男性。许多男性吟游诗人出身卑微，但吟游诗人需要有影响力的人脉，才能将她们的歌曲流传后世。

Most trobairitz are known for only a single song, while just two, Castelloza and the Comtessa de Diá, have left us several lyrics. Very little biographical information survives, and in most instances the details emphasize the women’s noble families or the powerful men they knew and loved. Many male troubadours came from humble origins, but a trobairitz needed influential connections for her songs to be preserved for posterity.

然而，如果我们想要理解游吟诗人革命的真正维度，就必须密切关注这一小部分作品。这个时代女性的歌词展现了歌唱爱情的不同方式。她们较少投入文字游戏，而是对浪漫情事进行更现实的描述。所描述的情境不那么程式化，却更令人信服。例如，请注意卡斯特洛萨在这首真挚的歌词中所采用的直接对话式语气：

Yet we must pay close attention to this small body of work if we hope to understand the true dimensions of the troubadour revolution. Lyrics by women from this era reveal a different approach to singing about love. They devote less energy to wordplay, and offer more realistic depictions of romantic affairs. The situations described are less stylized but more plausible. Note, for example, the direct, conversational tone Castelloza adopts in this heartfelt lyric:

英俊的朋友，作为真正的爱人

Handsome friend, as a lover true

我爱你，因为你让我快乐，

I loved you, for you pleased me,

但现在我明白我是个傻瓜，

but now I see I was a fool,

因为从那以后我几乎没见过你。

for I’ve barely seen you since.

我从未试图欺骗你，

I never tried to trick you,

你们却以恶报善，

yet you returned me bad for good;

我如此爱你，毫无遗憾，

I love you so, without regret,

但爱情却如此强烈地刺痛了我

but love has stung me with such force

我认为没有什么好事

I think no good can possibly

除非你说你爱我，否则就属于我^。3

be mine unless you say you love me.³

将此与贝尔纳特·德·文塔多恩（Bernart de Ventadorn）的夸张抗议进行比较，他从一个比喻跳到另一个比喻，寻找最夸张的方式来描述他作为情人的挫败感：

Compare this with the over-the-top protestations of Bernart de Ventadorn, who jumps from metaphor to metaphor as he seeks out the most extravagant ways to describe his frustrations as a lover:

就像一条大鳟鱼冲向鱼饵

Like some great trout that dashes to the bait

直到他感受到爱情的钩子，炽热而盲目，

Until he feels love’s hook, all hot and blindly,

我奔向太多的爱，太鲁莽而没有等待，

I rushed toward too much love, too rash to wait,

漫不经心，直到被爱的火焰包围，我才发现自己

Careless, till ringed in by love’s flames I find me

像被炉子上的火烧灼一样

Seared as by furnace fires upon a grate

但我却无法移动一只手，如此狭窄

Yet not one hand’s breadth can I move, so strait

这份爱将我束缚，将我束缚^。4

And narrow does this love enchain and bind me.⁴

我们必须赞扬贝尔纳特预见了未来几个世纪欧洲爱情抒情诗中最流行的基调，当时无数的香颂、彼特拉克十四行诗、弗罗托拉和牧歌都以一种近乎施虐的趣味来描述恋人的痛苦，但却披上了最浮夸的诗意外衣。即便如此，卡斯特洛扎更贴合我们这个时代原始的忏悔基调。但即便如此，她的方法也更加可信。

We must give Bernart credit for anticipating the most fashionable tone in European love lyrics during the centuries ahead, when countless chansons, Petrarchan sonnets, frottolas, and madrigals would enumerate the sufferings of lovers with a quasi-sadistic relish, but dressed up with the most ostentatious poetic conceits. Even so, Castelloza is more attuned to the raw confessional tone of our own day. But even beyond that, her approach is far more credible.

女吟游诗人的留存文本之所以重要，还有另一个原因。我相信，它们让我们大致了解了那些漫长岁月中被禁的方言歌曲。当时教会当局试图阻止女性歌唱她们的生活（但失败了），同时努力消除所有关于这类音乐的书面记录（可惜，他们成功了）。如果我们想要拨开审查制度的面纱，理解这些描绘日常生活的歌曲所表达的内容，那么“特罗巴里茨”歌谣就是我们最好的切入点。一千年来，基督教世界中的一群女性第一次有机会用非宗教音乐来表达她们的内心世界，她们的歌词——至少是其中的一些——得以流传后世。我们应该认真对待这些歌曲。

The surviving texts of the women troubadours are important for another reason. I believe they give us a reasonable approximation of the forbidden vernacular songs during those long centuries when church authorities tried to prevent women from singing about their lives (and failed), while working to eliminate all written record of this music (and, alas, succeeded). If we hope to penetrate behind the veil imposed by censorship, and grasp what the songs of day-to-day life might have expressed, the trobairitz offer our best entry point. For the first time in a thousand years, a group of women in the Christian world were given the opportunity to express their inner life in nonreligious music, and their lyrics—at least, a few of them—were preserved for posterity. We do well to take such songs seriously.

在吟游诗人兴起之前，男性当然也参与了这种被禁止的音乐创作，但如果我们能从教会的宣言和谴责中判断，他们演唱这类充满激情的歌曲的可能性远低于女性——至少在法国南部的贵族明确表示，如果男性演唱的是有关心碎的歌曲，其男子气概是毋庸置疑的之前是如此。当男性最终接受了这种表演风格时，他们获得了“创新者”的称号，以至于那些歌唱情感的女性在那个时代，吟游诗人的歌唱大多处于阴影之中。然而，即使在作为其有力倡导者的同时，男性也改变了这种习语。他们发展出了一种更加程式化的歌唱方式来表达自己的感受，仍然充满激情，但有意识地追求一种更加华丽、往往诗意地间接的表达方式。我不禁想起古代的抒情诗人，他们也继承了与女性创新者——萨福——密切相关的歌唱传统，并将其转化为一种文学体裁。对于男性吟游诗人来说，热情洋溢的歌唱成为一种高度自觉的艺术，以文本的精致和微妙为特征。如今我们通常将吟游诗人的歌词视为书面诗歌，这当然主要是因为缺乏现存的乐谱，但歌词本身也促进了这种向印刷页面的转变。

Men certainly participated in this prohibited music-making before the rise of the troubadours, but if we can judge by church proclamations and denunciations, they were far less likely to sing these kinds of passionate songs than women—at least until the nobles of southern France made clear that a man’s masculinity wasn’t in doubt if he sang about a broken heart. When men finally embraced this style of performance, they gained renown as the innovators, so much so that women who sang about emotions during the era remained mostly in the shadows. But men changed the idiom even while serving as powerful advocates for it. They developed a far more stylized manner of singing about their feelings, still infused with passion, but consciously aspiring to a more embellished, and often poetically indirect, mode of expression. I can’t help but be reminded of the lyric poets of the ancient world, who also took a tradition of singing closely linked with a female innovator—namely, Sappho—and turned it into a literary genre. In the case of the male troubadours, fervent singing became a highly self-conscious art marked by textual niceties and subtleties. The fact that we typically treat troubadour lyrics nowadays as written poetry is, of course, largely due to the absence of surviving musical notation, but the lyrics themselves facilitated this transition to the printed page.

至此，我们已收集到足够的证据，足以凸显女性音乐史上的诸多矛盾与悖论。中世纪时期，与歌唱联系最为密切的两类女性群体是修女和妓女，这令人深感不安。当然，还有许多其他女性歌唱，包括“特罗贝里茨”（trobairitz），但她们几乎无法像这两个群体那样激发中世纪人的想象力。然而，这种刻板印象恰恰证明了女性歌声所引发的恐惧和焦虑。这类音乐只有在安全的修道院里才能被认可，而在其他场合，它往往倾向于放荡和罪恶——几乎没有任何介于两者之间的空间。尽管存在这些担忧，女性仍然成功地为几种世俗歌曲，尤其是“三个L”歌曲——哀歌、摇篮曲和情歌——提供了创作动力。同样，这三种类型也很少被后世传承下来。

By now we have gathered enough evidence to highlight the many incongruities and paradoxes in the history of women’s music. There’s something deeply disturbing in the fact that the two groups of women most closely associated with singing during the medieval period were nuns and prostitutes. There were, of course, many other women singing songs, including the trobairitz, but they hardly captured the medieval imagination the way these two groups did. Yet this stereotyping testifies to the fear and anxieties stirred up by female voices raised in song. Such music was sanctioned only in the safety of the nunnery, while in other settings it tended to licentiousness and sin—with very little room for anything in between. Despite these apprehensions, women managed to provide the creative impulse behind several categories of secular song, especially the three L’s: the lament, the lullaby, and the love song. By this same token, these were three genres that rarely got preserved for posterity.

我们已经看到，情歌和哀歌因传递危险情绪而受到谴责，但为何这首不起眼的摇篮曲却被边缘化了呢？中世纪女性每天吟唱的摇篮曲肯定多达数千首，然而正如学者约翰·海恩斯指出的那样，“没有歌名，没有作曲家，也没有注明日期或乐谱的样本留存至今。”更令人匪夷所思的是，这种边缘化现象仍在持续。在我们这个时代。我们几乎没有超越中世纪权威人士的封闭世界观，对他们来说，这整个音乐类别，用海恩斯的话来说，仍然是“匿名的、庸俗的、幼稚的，缺乏成文的规范”。我们已经看到，只有在贵族开始吟唱情歌之后，它们才被接受为合法且具有艺术性。我是否可以大胆猜测一下，如果公爵和领主们专门吟唱催眠曲，催眠曲也会获得类似的声望？但这从未发生过，所以整个音乐类型仍在等待被接受为艺术音乐^。5

We have already seen how the love song and the lament were condemned for channeling dangerous emotions, but why was the humble lullaby marginalized? Thousands of lullabies must have been sung daily by medieval women, yet as scholar John Haines points out, “no titles, no composers and no dated or notated specimens survive.” Even stranger is the continuation of that marginalization in our own time. We have hardly progressed beyond the closed worldview of the medieval authorities, for whom this whole category of music remained, in Haines’s words, “anonymous, common, childish, and lacking written codification.” We have seen how love songs got accepted as legitimate and artistic only after the nobility started singing them. May I hazard a guess that the lullaby would have gained similar prestige if dukes and lords had specialized in them? That never happened, so the whole genre still awaits its acceptance as art music.⁵

我曾在其他地方提出，存在一类特殊的歌曲，我称之为述行歌曲，借用哲学家 JL 奥斯汀的术语。早在 20 世纪 50 年代，奥斯汀在牛津和哈佛的讲座中指出，某些话语在说出时具有改变世界的力量。它们只在特殊场合才会说出，而说出之后，人类事件会发生显著的变化。一个例子是我结婚那天，我说：“塔拉，我娶你为妻。”在我说完这句话之后，不仅我的配偶，而且法律和税务机关也对我区别对待。同样的事情发生在我告诉朋友：“我保证在星期五还你钱。”违背这个誓言可能比违背婚姻誓言的后果要小——除非我的朋友是个有报复倾向的高利贷者——但说出这些话仍然会以一种有意义的方式改变我的外部环境。述行歌曲的其他例子包括“我要给我们的新狗取名为亚里士多德”； “我封你为加拉哈德爵士”；“我告诉你，你是彼得”；以及“我给你湖人队和凯尔特人队的比赛开六分。”JL·奥斯汀写了一本关于施动性陈述的书，书名为《如何用言语做事》 ——这个名字很贴切，因为它颂扬了语言在特定语境和环境下改变世界的功效^。6

I have proposed elsewhere that a special group of songs exists that I call performatives, drawing on the terminology of philosopher J. L. Austin. Back in the 1950s, Austin pointed out in lectures at Oxford and Harvard that certain words have the power, when spoken, to change the world. They are only uttered on special occasions, and after they are said, human events are noticeably altered. One example took place on my wedding day, when I said: “I take you, Tara, to be my wife.” Not only my spouse, but legal and tax authorities, treated me differently after I made that statement. The same thing happens when I tell a friend: “I promise to pay you back the money on Friday.” Breaking that vow may have fewer consequences than violating a marriage vow—unless my friend is a loan shark with a penchant for vengeance—but saying these words still changes my external environment in a meaningful way. Other examples of performatives include “I’m naming our new dog Aristotle”; “I dub thee Sir Galahad”; “I say to thee, thou art Peter”; and “I’ll give you a six-point spread on the Lakers-Celtics game.” When J. L. Austin wrote a book about performative statements, he titled it How to Do Things with Words—a fitting name for a work that celebrated the efficacy of language in altering the world when spoken in certain contexts and settings.⁶

我提出这个问题是因为我认为我们需要对音乐的概念进行类似的拓展。有些歌曲也具有表演性——它们实际上改变了人类的事物，而不仅仅是表达情感和情绪。据我所知，没有一位学者注意到女性在这些特定的表演性音乐类型中似乎总是扮演着核心角色。我们已经看到萨满巫师的魔法音乐与女性气质息息相关，甚至男萨满巫师有时会身着女装。女巫、塞壬、妓女，甚至母亲和情人的音乐也同样如此。在所有这些情况下，按照奥斯汀严格的标准，女性的歌声都具有表演性。摇篮曲，顾名思义，就是一首旨在催眠孩子的歌曲，其成功与否并非以艺术标准来评判，而是以其改变行为的力量来衡量。回想一下，情歌和哀歌，这两种中世纪女性被诟病的特长，都起源于古代的生育仪式，旨在使垂死的神灵复活。这真是一首充满力量的歌！事实上，如果女性音乐没有与这种改变外部环境的表演能力联系在一起，它就不会如此令人畏惧。

I raise this matter because I believe we need to undertake a similar expansion in our notions about music. Some songs are also performatives—they actually change human affairs rather than simply express emotions and moods. No scholar, to my knowledge, has noticed that women always seem to play a central role in these specifically performative genres of music. We have already seen how the magical music of the shamans is associated with femininity, even to the point that male shamans sometimes dress in women’s attire. The same is true of the music of witches, sirens, courtesans, even mothers and lovers. In each of those cases, the woman’s song is a performative, by Austin’s rigorous standards. The lullaby, by definition, is a song that aims to put the child to sleep, and its success is judged not by artistic standards, but by its power to change behavior. Recall that both the love song and the lament, those two maligned specialties of medieval women, originated in the fertility rites of antiquity, where they aimed to resurrect a dying god. That’s a powerful song! Indeed, women’s music would not have been feared so much if it hadn’t been associated with this performative ability to alter the external environment.

只有在极少数情况下，主流文化才会鼓励这些灵性歌曲的介入。在这些情况下，女性歌曲的力量会被引导到可接受或理想的方向——例如，用于疗愈、求爱，或用于修道院的合法活动。即使情歌被人们质疑，有时甚至被彻底禁止，许多社群仍然拒绝承认缺乏音乐的婚礼的合法性——这种限制在欧洲部分地区一直持续到文艺复兴晚期。正因为歌曲拥有真正的力量，它们根本无法被抛弃；然而，依赖它们始终是一个危险的提议。

Only on the rarest of occasions did the mainstream culture encourage the intervention of these efficacious songs. In those instances, the powers of feminine songs were channeled in an acceptable or desirable direction—for example, in healing, in courtship, or in the sanctioned activities of a nunnery. Even as love songs were viewed with misgivings and sometimes prohibited outright, many communities refused to recognize the legality of a marriage ceremony that lacked music—a stricture that persisted in parts of Europe until the late Renaissance. Because songs possessed genuine power, they simply couldn’t be discarded; yet relying on them always was a dangerous proposition.

一旦我们理解了这种动态，我们就能明白，游吟诗人的崛起并非仅仅是男性发现并认可情歌的一个例子。这些著名的歌手也赋予了这一类型不同的审美标准，从而微妙地改变了它的表演特质。诱惑歌曲不再以诱惑为目的，至少不再是其主要功能。情歌在真正的求爱中往往毫无作用；它们仅仅歌颂和赞扬权贵，就像品达及其模仿者几个世纪前所做的那样。这些歌曲不再追求功效，而是以新的男性化形象追求艺术性，通常采用刻意风格化和夸张的方式。

Once we understand this dynamic, we can see that the rise of the troubadours wasn’t merely a case of men discovering and legitimizing the love song. These celebrated singers also imposed different aesthetic standards on the genre that subtly altered its performative qualities. Seduction songs were no longer intended to seduce, at least not as their primary function. Love songs often had no function in a real courtship; they merely extolled and praised the powerful, just as Pindar and his imitators had done centuries before. Rather than aiming for efficacy, these songs, in their new masculine guise, now aimed for artistry, often in an intentionally stylized and exaggerated manner.

这或许是西方音乐这一时期最重要的转折点，但其利弊参半。用白话文表达的世俗歌曲被转化为艺术，但音乐的表演能力——与为这一转变奠定基础的女性息息相关——却在这一过程中被削弱。从这一刻起，西方音乐不再指望歌曲能承载太多意义、表达情感，以及——在理想情况下——为音乐家提供谋生手段。

This is perhaps the most significant aspect of this whole interlude in Western music, but it is a mixed blessing. The secular song in the vernacular was turned into art, but the performative capabilities of the music, so closely connected to the women who had laid the groundwork for this shift, were weakened in the process. From this moment on in Western music, songs were rarely expected to do much beyond signifying meanings, expressing feelings, and—in ideal cases—giving the musician a way to earn a living.

当然，音乐的魔力不容轻易忽视。即使在今天，表演性歌曲依然存在。我们如今流行的音乐美学理论并没有给那些试图表达情感的歌曲留下太多空间，但这并没有阻止人们传承这些传统。萨满教和其他形式的疗愈音乐在现代仍然拥有实践者，甚至可以利用越来越多的科学证据来支持它们的应用。当这些证据出现在足够多的同行评审学术期刊上时，这些实践就会被重新定义为音乐疗法，如今，穿着白大褂的认证专业人士可以在治疗环境中运用这个术语。妓女不再被要求唱出她们那诱人的歌谣（尽管直到几十年前，这仍然是她们一项宝贵的职业技能）；但恋人和诱惑者在恋爱关系的每个阶段，无论是长期的求爱还是短暂的恋情，仍然依赖音乐。事实上，无论白天还是夜晚，表演性音乐无时无刻不在人们的议程上。最近的调查显示，70% 的人认为音乐能提高他们的工作效率，62% 的人依靠音乐帮助睡眠。另一方面，组织和机构利用音乐进行一系列操纵性或令人不快的表演性任务：协助强化审讯（或许我们应该称之为“音乐酷刑”），驱散闲逛者和无家可归者，鼓励购物者在零售环境中购买特定商品，等等。我们或许生活在一种将音乐视为纯粹消遣和娱乐的文化中，但令人惊讶的是，我们日常生活中的音乐往往不被这种束缚，而是致力于改变我们周围的世界^。7

Of course, the magic of music couldn’t be dismissed so easily. Performative songs still exist, even in the current day. Our fashionable theories of musical aesthetics don’t have much place for songs that try to do things, but that hasn’t stopped people from keeping these traditions alive. Shamanism and other forms of healing music still have their practitioners in a modern age, and can even draw upon a growing body of scientific evidence to support their use. When this evidence shows up in a sufficient number of peer-reviewed academic journals, these practices get relabeled as music therapy, a term that can now be applied in therapeutic situations by certified professionals in white coats. Courtesans are no longer expected to sing their alluring siren songs (although this was still a valuable job skill for them until only a few decades ago); but lovers and seducers continue to rely on music at every stage of a relationship, whether long-term courtship or short-term fling. In fact, there’s not a single hour of the day or night when performative music isn’t on the agenda. Recent surveys indicate that 70 percent of people believe music makes them more productive, and 62 percent rely on it to help them sleep. On the other extreme, music is used by organizations and institutions for a range of manipulative or unsavory performative tasks: assisting in enhanced interrogations (perhaps we should call it “musical torture”), dispersing loiterers and the homeless, encouraging shoppers to purchase specific items in retail environments, and so on. We may live in a culture that views music as mere diversion and entertainment, but it’s surprising how often the music of our day-to-day lives resists this pigeonholing and aims instead to alter the world around us.⁷

在这样的场合，我们很少使用“魔法”这个词。游吟诗人将世俗歌曲合法化为艺术，而不是咒语；即使一千年过去了，整个官方音乐教学法也丝毫没有偏离这种根深蒂固的方法。无论是表演者还是观众，我们都被教导将音乐视为一种审美体验，而不是一种迷人的源泉。我发现当我把音乐说成是一种神奇的力量时，人们会感到焦虑，所以我学会了使用不同的词语：我称音乐为人类生活中的变革推动者，或催化剂。但它仍然是魔法，即使名字更花哨。并非所有巫师都手持魔杖，戴着尖顶帽。有些人手里拿着萨克斯管或吉他出现在工作岗位上。我们仍然渴望他们改变生活的干预，即使他们技艺的这一方面大多仍未得到承认。

We rarely use the word “magic” in such settings. The troubadours legitimized secular songs as art, and not as incantation; and the whole official pedagogy of music, even a thousand years later, hasn’t deviated a whit from that ingrained approach. Both as performers and audience, we are taught to view music as an aesthetic experience, not a source of enchantment. I find people get anxious when I talk about music as a magical force, so I have learned to use different words: I call music a change agent in human life, or a catalyst. But it’s still magic, even under a fancier name. Not all wizards carry wands and wear pointed hats. Some show up at work with a saxophone or guitar in hand. And we still crave their life-changing interventions, even if that aspect of their craft remains mostly unacknowledged.

十三

13

观众的发明

The Invention of the Audience

我上小学的时候，有些老师还管那段漫长的时期叫“黑暗时代”。从古代文明衰落到文艺复兴开始的这段时期，在当时被当作文化层面的断电事故。朋友们，你们的灯会重新亮起来，但你们可能需要等待一段时间——最多一千年，误差在一两个世纪之间。

When I was a youngster in elementary school, some teachers still called it the “Dark Ages.” That long interlude from the fall of ancient civilizations to the start of the Renaissance was treated like the cultural equivalent of the power grid going down. Your lights will come back on, folks, but you may need to wait a while—up to a thousand years, give or take a century or two.

但如今，人们不再认为那个时代那么黑暗。在二十世纪，中世纪研究领域的大学教职数量增加了一千倍，这些学者们奋力抗争，试图摆脱其领域二流的地位。该领域曾一度被视为文艺复兴时期明星们的暖场表演，而这往往被视为缺乏才华的铺垫。约翰·赫伊津哈、C.S. 刘易斯、马克·布洛赫、雅克·勒戈夫、艾蒂安·吉尔松和多萝西·塞耶斯等形形色色的学者，为这个时代的逐渐重塑（如果我可以借用麦迪逊大道上恰当的术语）做出了贡献。新的定位颠覆了旧的定位。用塞耶斯的话来说，中世纪如今是一个“焕然一新的世界，阳光明媚，色彩绚丽”——不再是黑暗——尽管，在充满……的精神中披露后，她承认那是一段“充满血腥、悲伤、死亡和赤裸裸的暴行”的时期^。1

But the period is not considered quite so dark anymore. During the course of the twentieth century, the number of university teaching positions in medieval studies increased by a thousandfold, and these academics fought against the second-class status of their field, which had so often been treated as a less talented warm-up act for the stars of the Renaissance. Scholars as diverse as Johan Huizinga, C. S. Lewis, Marc Bloch, Jacques Le Goff, Étienne Gilson, and Dorothy Sayers contributed to a gradual rebranding (if I may borrow the appropriate Madison Avenue term) of the age. And the new positioning turned the old one on its head. In Sayers’s words, the Middle Ages were now a “new-washed world of clear sun and glittering color”—no more darkness here—although, in a spirit of full disclosure, she admits that it was a period “full of blood and grief and death and naked brutality.”¹

尽管这种重新校准在很大程度上是合理的，但本书所关注的许多音乐仍然笼罩在黑暗之中。即使我们拼凑出一幅更准确的西方世界音乐生活图景，其中很大一部分仍然遗失，或许永远无法复原。最终，随着基督教兴起一千多年后游吟诗人技艺的传播，更广泛的音乐活动逐渐被人们所知，它们突然被讨论和记录，有时甚至被视为值得尊重。最初出现在法国南部的变化蔓延到整个欧洲，改变了它们所触及的每一​​个地方的音乐文化。但目前尚不完全清楚，这些记录的变化是否代表了人们演唱方式的重大转变：或许欧洲只是见证了那些早已流传、但此前被鄙视和边缘化的本土音乐风格地位的上升。在很多情况下，传播的可能并非模因，而仅仅是光芒。

Despite this recalibration, for the most part well justified, much of the music that is the focus of this book remains clouded in darkness. Even as we piece together a more accurate picture of the musical life of the Western world, large parts of it are lost to us, probably never to be recovered. Finally, with the dissemination of the troubadours’ craft more than a thousand years after the rise of Christianity, a far wider range of musical activities emerged into the light, and it was suddenly being discussed and documented and sometimes even treated as worthy of respect. Changes that first appeared in southern France moved on to Europe at large, transforming the musical culture in each and every place they touched. But it’s still not entirely clear whether the documented changes represent a substantial shift in how people sang: perhaps Europe only saw a rise in the status of vernacular styles already in circulation but previously despised and marginalized. It’s likely that, in many instances, it wasn’t the meme that spread, merely the light.

传统记载依然将贵族的功劳归功于他们，不仅在于歌曲的创新，也在于歌曲的传播。据说，我们第一位游吟诗人威廉九世的孙女，阿基坦的埃莉诺，在1137年嫁给了法国统治者路易七世，并将这种音乐几乎视为一种文化嫁妆。在这场联姻之后，这些在北方被称为“游吟诗人”（trouvères）的歌手的歌曲开始流传，并出现在手稿和轶事记载中。 （顺便说一句，唯一一件与王后有关的艺术品是她送给丈夫的结婚礼物，一个水晶花瓶，目前收藏在卢浮宫。这件花瓶是她从吟游诗人祖父那里继承下来的，而她的祖父又是从萨拉戈萨的伊斯兰统治者那里继承下来的——这是艺术从穆斯林世界传播到普罗旺斯的有形物理象征。）即使在这段婚姻被废除之后，在埃莉诺成为英国未来国王亨利·金雀花的妻子几周前，她的女儿玛丽和阿利克斯仍然赞助世俗音乐，捍卫宫廷爱情的精神。

Traditional accounts continue to give credit to the nobility, not just for the innovations in the songs, but also their dissemination. We are told that Eleanor of Aquitaine, granddaughter of our first troubadour, William IX, brought this music with her, almost as a kind of cultural dowry, to her marriage to Louis VII, ruler of France, in 1137. In the aftermath of this union, the songs of the trouvères, as these singers were known in the north, came out into the open, finding their way into manuscripts and anecdotal accounts. (By the way, the only surviving art object linked to the queen is her wedding gift to her husband, a rock crystal vase currently in the Louvre inherited from her troubadour grandfather, who had received it, in turn, from the Islamic ruler of Zaragoza—a tangible physical symbol of artistic transmission from the Muslim world to Provence.) Even after the annulment of this marriage, a few weeks before Eleanor became wife of Henry Plantagenet, future king of England, her daughters Marie and Alix continued as patrons of secular music and champions of the ethos of courtly love.

勃艮第公主贝阿特丽斯也有类似的故事，她大约在同一时期嫁给了神圣罗马帝国皇帝腓特烈一世。贝阿特丽斯被认为将法国情歌带到了德国。例如，我们知道她的随从中包括一位名叫普罗万斯的吟游诗人。这位法国歌手甚至可能将圆桌骑士帕西法尔的故事介绍到了德国，为它在沃尔夫拉姆·冯·埃森巴赫和理查德·瓦格纳的赞助下转变为民族史诗奠定了基础。其他皇室贵族也被认为在使这些激动人心、性感的歌曲合法化和传播方面发挥了类似的作用。即使是英格兰国王狮心王理查德，亨利二世和阿基坦的埃莉诺的儿子，也在史册上以新表演风格的倡导者的身份出现，这既通过他自己的歌曲，也通过他对吟游诗人布隆德尔·德·内勒的赞助。

A similar story is told of Princess Beatrice of Burgundy, who married Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, around this same time. Beatrice is credited with bringing the love songs of France into Germany. We know, for example, that her retinue included a trouvère, Guiot de Provins. This French singer may even have introduced the story of Parsifal, knight of the Round Table, into Germany, setting the stage for its transformation into a national epic under the auspices of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Richard Wagner. Other royals and nobles are credited with similar roles in legitimizing and disseminating these exciting and sensual songs. Even King Richard the Lionheart of England, son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, shows up in the annals of history as a champion of new performance styles, both via his own songs and through his alleged patronage of the minstrel Blondel de Nesle.

我们应该如何看待这些丰富多彩的故事？在歌曲史上这个极具创造力的时期，欧洲的世袭统治者是否也是音乐创新背后的驱动力？正如我们将在下文中看到的，其他地位不那么显赫的人物也在没有皇室血统的帮助下积极传播音乐。即便如此，在评估西方音乐正在发生的结构性变化时，尤其是在表演者摆脱基督教权威束缚的情况下，我们仍需要认真对待这些贵族的特权。第一位游吟诗人威廉九世两次被教会逐出教会，法国南部音乐创新的伟大时期也以阿尔比十字军东征而告终，这并非巧合——在那场史无前例的时刻，教皇在欧洲的土地上对被怀疑持有异端观点的法国基督徒发动了一场圣战。教皇英诺森三世试图从基督教世界根除危险的卡特里派神学的整个历史超出了本研究的范围；可以这么说，推动这场运动的狂热分子（以及为宗教裁判所奠定基础的狂热分子，宗教裁判所的建立是为了对抗异端邪说的任何挥之不去的影响）很难乐意看到受伊斯兰影响的音乐传统在法国蓬勃发展。

How should we treat these colorful stories? Could it be true that the hereditary rulers of Europe were also the driving force behind musical innovation during this intensely creative period in the history of song? As we shall see below, other, less exalted personages were actively spreading the music without the assistance of a royal pedigree. Even so, we need to take the prerogatives of these nobles seriously in assessing the tectonic shifts underway in Western music, especially as performers freed themselves from the constraints of Christian authorities. It’s no coincidence that the first troubadour, William IX, was excommunicated twice by the church, or that the great period of musical innovation in the south of France ended with the Albigensian Crusade—that unprecedented moment when the pope launched a holy war on European soil against French Christians suspected of holding heretical views. The whole history of Pope Innocent III’s attempt to eradicate the dangerous Catharist theology from Christendom is beyond the scope of this study; suffice it to say that the zealots who pushed this campaign (and laid the groundwork for the Inquisition, which was established to combat any lingering effects of the heresy) could hardly have been pleased to see Islamic-influenced musical traditions flourishing in France.

格雷尔·马库斯（Greil Marcus）在其开创性著作《口红痕迹》（Lipstick Traces）中，推测了卡特里派异端与后来朋克摇滚的兴起之间可能存在的联系，其中以20世纪50年代在巴黎兴起的国际字母派运动（Letterist International movement）为核心，该运动相当于欧洲版的“垮掉的一代”（Beat Generation）。乍一看，这个理论似乎有些离奇，但我的研究揭示了这种另类基督教模式如何不仅颠覆了当时的音乐等级制度，还可能为未来的动乱和叛乱奠定了基础。在法国南部，宗教异端是成熟的反权威运动，反对教会官员的征税和世俗统治。埃马纽埃尔·勒鲁瓦·拉杜里（Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie）在对中世纪卡特里派村庄蒙塔尤（Montaillou）的研究中写道：“在奥克西塔尼亚地区从13世纪到17世纪漫长的异端历史中，围绕什一税的冲突始终潜伏且反复出现。”相比之下，关于教义的争论“往往缺席，或仅在少数引人入胜但孤立的点上显得重要”。没错，如果我们愿意将“朋克”一词定义得足够宽泛，卡特里派的确是朋克的雏形。该教派用一种截然不同的仪式——“圣礼”（Consolamentum）取代了天主教的洗礼，这进一步加深了他们对传统道德的拒绝。这种仪式会在大多数信徒临终前赦免他们的罪孽。这种做法允许身体强健的人有一定程度的放荡行为，这几乎肯定影响了卡特里派的音乐文化，并促成了更明显性感化的抒情表达的出现^。2

Greil Marcus, in his seminal work Lipstick Traces, speculates on possible connections between the Catharist heresy and the later rise of punk rock—with the Paris-based Letterist International movement of the 1950s, a kind of more radicalized European equivalent of the Beat Generation, serving as a linchpin. At first glance, this theory may seem extraordinary, but my research reveals the paths by which this alternative mode of Christianity not only reversed the musical hierarchies of its own time, but may have set the stage for future upheavals and rebellions. In southern France, religious heresies were full-fledged anti-authoritarian movements, rejecting the taxation and earthly dominion of church officials. “In the long history of heresy in Occitania from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century,” writes Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his study of the medieval Catharist village Montaillou, “the conflict over tithes is always underlying and recurrent.” Disputes over dogma, in contrast, are “often absent, or important on only a few fascinating but isolated points.” Yes, the Cathars were proto-punks, if we are willing to define that term broadly enough. The rejection of conventional morality in their midst was aided by the sect’s replacement of Catholic baptism with a very different ritual, the Consolamentum, which absolved sins for most believers right before they died. This practice allowed for a degree of licentious behavior among the hale and hearty that almost certainly influenced Cathar musical culture, assisting in the emergence of more overtly sexualized lyrical expression.²

但异教徒们显然得到了非洲的帮助，创作了亵渎神明的音乐。从罗马的角度来看，异端邪说的主要危险或许在于其教条，但音乐是一种症状，就像任何患病的器官一样，必须治疗，否则就像坏死的肢体一样，必须从根部砍掉——而这根正生长在穆斯林世界。我们缺乏足够详细的文献资料来研究这些更大规模的战争对音乐的影响。焚烧异端卡特里派的文本（有时也焚烧卡特里派信徒本身）限制了我们获取异议观点和其他经验证据，而这些观点和其他经验证据有助于我们理解歌曲在这场冲突中扮演的角色。我猜想，未来某一天，或许还会有令人惊讶的档案资料浮现，并将揭示这些更大规模的战争对音乐的影响有多深远。竞争影响了我们现在称之为“流行文化”的事物。例如，女性在卡特里派运动中扮演着关键角色，而且在信徒队伍中，她们的人数似乎超过了男性。音乐的女性化发生在同一时期，而充满激情的世俗歌曲——此前与罪孽深重的女性联系在一起——也获得了尊重并获得了新的追随者，这难道仅仅是巧合吗？唉，这一时期仍有太多东西被隐藏；我们大多只能根据零碎的证据进行推测。然而，更大的图景仍然相当清晰，提供了充足的证据，证明被逐出教会的贵族和志同道合的盟友如何勇敢地将音乐从教会的束缚中解放出来。

But the heretics apparently had help from Africa in making their blasphemous music. The main danger of the heresy, from the perspective of Rome, may have been its dogmas, but music was a symptom, and like any diseased organ, must be treated or lopped off like a necrotic limb at its root—and that root was growing out of the Muslim world. We lack the documentation to study the impact on music of these larger battles in sufficient detail. The burning of heretical Catharist texts (and sometimes the burning of the Cathars themselves) limits our access to dissenting views and other empirical evidence that would help us understand the role songs played in this conflict. I suspect that surprising archival material may still emerge someday, and will show how much these larger rivalries influenced matters we now would categorize as “popular culture.” For example, women played a key role in the Catharist movement, and they appear to have outnumbered men among the ranks of believers. Can it be pure coincidence that a feminization of music occurred at this same time, and that passionate secular songs—previously associated with sinful women—rose in esteem and gained new adherents? Alas, so much is still hidden from view during this period; we are mostly limited to speculation on the basis of fragmentary evidence. Yet the larger picture remains fairly clear, providing ample evidence of the boldness with which excommunicated nobles and like-minded allies freed music from its ecclesiastical restraints.

但皇室并非功不可没。歌曲的流行也以其他方式进行。巡回艺人的历史可以追溯到古代，在基督教兴起后，尽管遭到教会和政治当局的敌视，他们依然顽强生存。早在公元四世纪，艺人就被禁止参加基督教圣礼，尽管教会除了骚扰这些表演者之外，很少采取其他行动，也从未真正将他们根除。在某种程度上，宗教领袖们处于守势，担心罪恶的歌曲不仅会污染教徒的态度，还会污染神职人员的神圣生活。公元八世纪，克洛夫肖会议禁止本笃会允许“诗人、竖琴师、音乐家和滑稽演员”进入修道院，并严禁神父“自己或他人演奏歌舞”。这些规则经常被违反：巡回音乐家有时甚至参与圣礼的神圣音乐创作。前往东约克郡贝弗利的圣玛丽教堂，游客至今仍能看到一根引人注目的柱子，被称​​为“吟游诗人之柱”，描绘的是一群身着世俗服饰的歌手。在巴黎，一座小教堂被献给“吟游诗人圣朱利安”，在伦敦，圣巴塞洛缪医院建在亨利一世于1102年设立的“吟游诗人修道院”旧址上。这些纪念碑见证了卑微的街头艺人与中世纪欧洲既有机构的共存^。3

But royals don’t get all the credit. Songs went viral in other ways. Traveling entertainers date back to ancient times, and they persisted after the rise of Christianity despite hostility from church and political authorities. As far back as the fourth century, entertainers were denied Christian sacraments, although the church rarely did more than harass these performers, never quite managing to eradicate them. To some extent, religious leaders were on the defensive, fearing that sinful songs would contaminate not just the attitudes of churchgoers but also the holy life of the clergy. In the eighth century, the Council of Cloveshoe forbade Benedictines from allowing “poets, harpers, musicians, and buffoons” into their monasteries, and a priest was strictly forbidden from “playing the gleeman with himself or others.” Such rules were frequently violated: traveling musicians sometimes even participated in the divine music-making of holy services. Visitors to St. Mary’s Church in Beverley, East Yorkshire, can still see a striking column, known as the minstrel’s pillar, depicting a group of singers dressed in secular garb. In Paris, a chapel was dedicated to “St. Julian of the Minstrels,” and in London St. Bartholomew’s Hospital was constructed on a site originally established as a “minstrel’s priory” by Henry I in 1102. These monuments testify to the coexistence of humble street entertainers and the established institutions of medieval Europe.³

然而，巡回演出的音乐家经常遭遇诽谤、驱逐、法律限制，甚至人身攻击。在锡耶纳，法律允许公民攻击吟游诗人而不受法律制裁。神圣罗马帝国的一部法典《萨克森明镜》（Sachsenspiegel）于十三世纪初以德语成文，其中规定：“受雇的战士及其子女、吟游诗人以及所有非婚生子女均无权利。” 从本质上讲，吟游诗人与私生子或暴徒并无二致^。4

Yet traveling musicians frequently encountered slander, banishment, legal restrictions, and even physical assault. In Siena, statutes allowed citizens to attack a minstrel without suffering legal consequences. The Sachsenspiegel, a legal code of the Holy Roman Empire written in German in the early thirteenth century, declares that “hired fighters and their children, minstrels, and all those illegitimately born are all without rights.” In essence, the musician was no different from a bastard or a thug.⁴

中世纪的音乐家经常被指控使用巫术。有些人甚至认为魔鬼会化身为吟游诗人，用迷人的歌舞引诱基督徒堕入地狱。花衣魔笛手的故事可以追溯到1300年，它捕捉到了这些巡回表演者在他们所到访的村庄所激起的恐惧和敬畏。根据这个故事，哈默林镇雇佣了一位风笛手，用他神奇的音乐将城中肆虐的老鼠引诱到威悉河，并将它们淹死——但当镇长拒绝支付他的报酬时，他却用同样的方法对待了镇上的孩子们。今天我们认为这是一个童话故事，但在中世纪人看来，这种音乐巫术代表着真正的威胁。哈默林现存的记录表明，中世纪晚期的居民将这段故事视为真实的历史，而非象征性的神话。即使在今天，我们仍然告诫孩子们要提防陌生人。再加上当时的社会环境，许多最神秘的新来者都是形形色色的艺人，再加上浓重的迷信和轻信，音乐家很容易被妖魔化。即使在20世纪，美国流浪的布鲁斯音乐家也被指控与魔鬼做交易，而一些表演者自己或许也觉得演奏这种罪恶的音乐就等于与恶魔势力签订了某种隐性契约。半个世纪后，在我十几岁的时候，重金属摇滚乐手被指控崇拜撒旦——事实上，他们经常自己宣传这些黑暗的联系，作为一种营销手段。我们真的进化到远远超越中世纪的思维模式了吗？

Medieval musicians were frequently accused of sorcery. Some people even believed that the devil took on the form of a minstrel and in that guise enticed Christians to perdition with beguiling songs and dances. The story of the Pied Piper, which dates back to 1300, captures both the fear and awe these itinerant performers inspired in the villages they visited. According to the tale, a piper is hired by the town of Hamelin to use his magical music to lure the rats infesting the city into the Weser River, where they drown—but when the mayor refuses to pay him for his work, he does the same with the children of the town. Today we consider this a fairy tale, but to the medieval mind such musical witchcraft represented a genuine threat. Surviving records from Hamelin show that residents in the late medieval period saw this account as factual history rather than symbolic myth. Even in the current day, we instruct our children to beware of strangers. Just add to that a social milieu in which many of the most mysterious newcomers to a community are entertainers of various sorts, and mix in a heavy dose of superstition and credulity, and it’s easy to see how a musician could become demonized. Even in the twentieth century, wandering blues musicians in the United States were accused of making deals with the devil, and some of the performers themselves may have felt that playing this sinful music represented an implicit contract with demonic forces. Half a century later, during my teenage years, heavy metal rockers were accused of satanic worship—in fact, they often promoted these dark affiliations themselves as a kind of marketing angle. Have we really evolved that far beyond the medieval mindset?

尽管面临这些障碍，巡回音乐家们依然坚持不懈，甚至蓬勃发展。社区里的许多人一定对他们的到来表示欢迎，不仅因为他们的歌曲和短剧，也因为他们带来的新闻远方传来的信息尤为重要，尤其是在文盲泛滥的时代，个人而非文件才是当时主要“新闻”的传播者。在那个时期，新闻和音乐紧密相连——甚至城镇公告员或传令官都会配备鼓、猎号、锣或钟。但如果城里的陌生人是一位技艺精湛的演奏家，能够将信息与娱乐融为一体，村民们一定会格外高兴。即使一些市政和宗教权威可能更希望这些外来者不会打扰村民们自给自足的日常生活，但流动乐师提供的服务太宝贵了，不容许完全禁止。议员和神职人员也需要来自远方的状态报告，而阻断这些与外界联系的风险，尽管在某些情况下会造成破坏，但很少有人愿意冒这个险。

Despite these obstacles, traveling musicians persisted, even thrived. Many in the community must have welcomed their presence, not just for the songs and skits, but also for the news they brought from afar, especially in an age of widespread illiteracy when individuals, not documents, were disseminators of the leading ‘stories’ of the day. News and music were closely intertwined in this period—even the town crier or herald came equipped with drum or hunting horn or gong or bell. But villagers must have been especially pleased when the stranger in town was a skilled performer who could combine information with entertainment. Even if some civic and religious authorities might have preferred an environment in which these outsiders never disturbed the self-sufficient isolation of day-to-day life, the services provided by itinerant musicians were too valuable to allow their absolute prohibition. Councilors and clerics also needed status reports from afar, and the risk of blocking these links to the outside world, however disruptive in some circumstances, was a chance few were willing to take.

在接下来的篇幅中，我们将越来越关注观众对音乐的影响，而中世纪晚期的这个节点代表着听众特权在欧洲生活中占据主导地位的转折点。观众当然早已存在，但直到吟游诗人介入后，他们才被合法化为文化品味的仲裁者。我们已经看到罗马精英是如何蔑视哑剧和其他大众娱乐节目中取悦观众的滑稽动作的。讽刺作家尤维纳尔用一句被引用最多的拉丁语短语“ panem et circenses ”（面包和马戏）表达了这种蔑视。他认为，这些就是大众想要的一切：廉价的食物和粗俗的娱乐。维吉尔和贺拉斯等最受艺术赞赏的古罗马人，他们的作品是为了帝国及其强大的领导人，而不是为了普通观众。事实上，流行文化的概念对这些古人以及追随他们的基督教权威来说，似乎是一个矛盾的说法。旨在取悦民众的音乐，从定义上来说，是一种低劣的艺术。其他目标和更高尚的考量——灌输美德、促进公民或社区利益、侍奉上帝或安抚权贵——被认为更为重要。

In the pages ahead, we will find ourselves increasingly concerned with the impact of the audience on music, and this juncture in the late medieval period represents the tipping point when the prerogatives of the listener came to the forefront in European life. The audience certainly existed before, but it got legitimized as an arbiter of cultural tastes only after the intercession of the troubadours. We have already seen how the Roman elites scorned the crowd-pleasing antics of pantomime and other popular entertainments. The satirist Juvenal captured this disdain in one of the most quoted Latin phrases, panem et circenses—“bread and circuses.” These were all the masses wanted, he suggested, cheap food and crass entertainment. The ancient Romans most admired for their artistry, such as Virgil and Horace, made their works for the empire and its powerful leaders, not for a popular audience. Indeed, the concept of pop culture would have seemed an oxymoron to these ancients, as well as to the Christian authorities who followed in their wake. Music that aimed to please the populus was, by definition, a degraded art. Other goals and higher considerations—instilling virtue, advancing civic or community interests, serving God, or appeasing the powerful—were deemed more important.

然而，随着游吟诗人的创新传播开来，他们帮助提升了这群曾经被鄙视的听众的地位。一种共生表演者和听众之间由此产生了一种关系，前者的声誉与后者的反响密不可分。甚至教会也开始在其自身的圣地内认识到这种转变。基督教音乐作曲家最终被认可并获得前所未有的地位，这绝非巧合，而这恰恰是在白话抒情诗成为主流之后。公元312年，君士坦丁大帝皈依基督教后，又过了一千多年，一首圣歌弥撒才因其作曲家而声名鹊起。但我们不应惊讶地发现，这部作品背后的音乐家纪尧姆·德·马肖早已因其关于宫廷爱情的歌曲和诗歌而广受赞誉。正如音乐史上许多其他案例一样，一个强大的机构意识到了流行音乐的转变，并试图将其用于自身的组织目的——因此，马肖，一位肉体之爱的歌手，最终转变为一位在教堂礼拜仪式中体现神圣之爱的庆祝者。

And yet, as the innovations of the troubadours spread, they helped raise the status of this previously despised audience. A symbiotic relationship now emerged between the performer and listeners, with the renown and reputation of the former inextricably linked to the response of the latter. Even the church came to recognize this shift within its own sacred precincts. It’s hardly a coincidence that composers of Christian music were finally recognized by name and achieved unprecedented status only after this mainstreaming of the vernacular lyric. More than a thousand years elapsed after Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, in AD 312, before a sung mass gained renown for its composer. But we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the musician behind this work, Guillaume de Machaut, was already acclaimed for his songs and poems about courtly love. As in so many other instances in music history, a powerful institution recognized a shift in popular music and aimed to tap into it for its own organizational purposes—hence Machaut, a singer of fleshly love, gets transformed into a celebrant of divine love as embodied in church liturgy.

在马肖创作弥撒之前，伊夫雷亚抄本和阿普特抄本等汇编汇集了一系列匿名曲调，牧师可以混合搭配《祈求者颂》和《荣耀颂》等，而不必担心是否出自单个作曲家之手。在其他情况下，手稿可能包含单独的弥撒曲调，例如《图尔奈弥撒》、《巴塞罗那弥撒》、《索邦弥撒》和《图卢兹弥撒》 ——但即使这些作品的音乐也是匿名的，今天的学者认为不同的作曲家负责这些作品的不同部分。在极少数情况下，宗教音乐（尽管不是整首弥撒曲）作曲家的名字会在马肖之前的时期流传下来。例如，希尔德加德·冯·宾根给我们留下了十二世纪令人印象深刻的作品——在我看来，这是该时期情感最强烈的音乐。但即便如此，如果她没有担任修道院院长，能够直接监督手稿的准备工作，她的音乐或许也永远不会被如此细致地记录下来。在大多数情况下，只有在世俗演奏家走出社会边缘，获得一定程度的听众赞誉之后，宗教作曲家才能在西方世界声名鹊起。

Before Machaut’s mass, compilations such as the Ivrea Codex and the Apt Codex pulled together a range of anonymous settings, and priests could mix and match Kyries and Glorias and so on without any concern over presenting a unified statement from a single composer. In other instances, manuscripts might contain an individual mass setting, as in the Tournai Mass, the Barcelona Mass, the Sorbonne Mass, and the Toulouse Mass—but even here the music was anonymous, and scholars today believe that different composers were responsible for various parts of these works. In very rare instances, the name of a composer of religious music (although not an entire mass) survives from the period before Machaut. For example, Hildegard von Bingen left us an impressive body of work from the twelfth century—the most emotionally powerful music of the period, in my opinion. But even in this case, her music would probably never have been documented with such care if she had not served as head of a monastery and could thus directly supervise the preparation of manuscripts. For the most part, sacred composers gained distinction in the Western world only after secular performers had stepped out from the margins of society and gained some degree of acclaim from their listeners.

此时，数百名表演者成为音乐界的明星，文士不仅记录他们的歌曲，还记录他们的生活点滴。即使并非出身贵族的歌手也能声名鹊起，皇室赞助的规则也因此发生了微妙的变化。权贵阶层发现自己的地位与被吸引到宫廷的音乐家的名声息息相关，他们很快意识到，如果自己能得到受人尊敬的歌手的赞美，自身的声誉或许也会得到提升。反过来，最杰出的歌手也越来越自信，因为他们不再依赖世俗领主的恩惠，因为他们总能游历四方，找到其他人来支持他们的艺术创作。那个时代歌手的传记存世不多，内容也颇为可疑，但其中不乏对这些流浪艺人巡回演出的得意洋洋的赞颂——这些夸耀似乎暗示，即使在当时，巡演的成功也是艺术造诣的象征。这一新现象首次催生了一种危险的理念，在当时颇为激进，在西方音乐史上也前所未有：即广义上的观众不仅是艺术卓越性的合法仲裁者，或许更是音乐成就的最高、最值得信赖的评判者。

At this point in history, hundreds of performers emerged as stars of the music world, and there were scribes to document not just their songs but also the details of their lives. Even singers who were not born nobles could now achieve renown, and the rules of royal patronage were subtly altered as a result. Powerful elites, who found that their status was linked to the fame of the musicians attracted to their courts, soon realized that their own reputations might be enhanced if they received praise in the lyric of an esteemed singer. The most prominent singers, in turn, gained confidence from the growing proof that they were no longer dependent on the good favor of an earthly lord, because they could always travel elsewhere and find others to support their artistry. The surviving biographies of singers from this era are filled with gaps and dubious facts, yet frequently include triumphant declarations about the extent of the journeys made by these wandering performers—boasts that imply that, even back then, success in taking the show on the road served as an indicator of artistic merit. This new phenomenon carried with it the first stirrings of a dangerous idea, radical at the time and unprecedented in the history of Western music: namely, that the audience, defined broadly, is not just a legitimate arbiter of artistic excellence, but perhaps the highest, most trustworthy judge of musical achievement.

要理解这一转变有多么重大，我们必须重新审视我们对观众的理解。“观众”一词源于拉丁语“audientia”（指听或聆听的行为），或许是所有音乐中最容易被误解的概念。我曾听过一些严肃的理论家，他们甚至断言，每一首音乐的创作都考虑到了观众。他们不仅驳斥，甚至嘲笑任何认为音乐存在于表演者与观众之间这种互惠关系之外的说法。而我则持相反观点。基于现有证据，我不得不得出结论：人类历史上大多数音乐的繁荣发展并不需要观众来使其合法化。事实上，在很多情况下，表演者和观众之间并不存在任何有意义的区别。当史前猎人在追踪猎物时通过乐句相互交流时，谁是……观众？这个概念毫无意义，因为这些猎人都是同一个整体过程的参与者。当传统社群聚集在一起欢唱节日歌曲时，观众是谁？再次强调，我们试图在参与者和表演者之间划出任何界限，即使不是误导，也是武断的。毕竟，当每个人都唱歌时，就没有人会扮演被动的听众了。中世纪僧侣们在黎明前聚集在一起吟诵，或者即使在今天，教堂会众们齐声歌唱，观众又是谁呢？你或许会假设上帝就是观众，但这是一个误导性的、简化的模型；它无法理解群体凝聚力和个人狂喜等微妙的动态，而正是这些动态定义了这些情境。当劳改队的囚犯在强制劳动期间唱歌时，他们的观众是谁？如果你说他们唱歌是为了取悦狱警和监工——他们是唯一在场的“观众”，那你只是表明你对当时的情况了解甚少。水手们的船夫号子歌的听众是谁？也许是鱼？不，我不这么认为。我上学的时候，大家在集会上一起唱国歌，听众又是谁？国旗？不，这说不通。那你在淋浴时唱歌，或者在车里跟着收音机唱歌呢？我还可以举出几十个例子，但要点应该已经很清楚了。在人类历史的大部分时间里，音乐已经深深地融入了我们的生活，以至于“听众”这个概念既没有必要，有时甚至是一种狭隘的扭曲。

To understand how momentous this shift is, we must recalibrate our own notions about audiences. This term, derived from the Latin audientia (referring to the act of hearing or listening), may be the most misunderstood concept in all of music. I’ve heard serious theorists go so far as to assert that every piece of music is created with an audience in mind. They not only dismiss, but actually ridicule, any suggestion that music exists outside of this reciprocal relationship between entertainer and audience. I would argue the exact opposite. Based on the available evidence, I am forced to conclude that most music during the course of human history has flourished without requiring any audience to legitimize it. Indeed, in many cases, no meaningful distinctions between performer and audience can be drawn. When prehistoric hunters communicated back and forth via musical phrases while stalking prey, who was the audience? The notion is meaningless, because these hunters were all participants in the same holistic process. When traditional communities joined together in festive singing, who was the audience then? Once again, any line we might attempt to draw between participant and performer would be arbitrary, if not actually misleading. After all, when everybody sings, there’s no one left to play the role of passive listener. Who was the audience when monks gathered together in the predawn hours to chant in medieval times, or when the members of church congregations join their voices in song even in the current day? You might postulate that God is the audience, but that would be a misleading, reductionist model; it fails to grasp all the subtle dynamics of group bonding and personal ecstasy that define these situations. When prisoners in work gangs sang during forced labor, who was their audience? If you say they were singing to entertain the prison guards and overseers, the only ‘audience’ present at these performances, you simply show how little you understand the situation. Who was the audience for the sea shanties of sailors? The fish, perhaps? No, I don’t think so. And who was the audience, during my own schooldays, when we all joined together to sing the National Anthem at an assembly? The flag? No, that doesn’t make sense. What about when you sing in the shower, or along with the radio in your car? I could add dozens of other examples, but the point should already be clear. In most of human history, music has been so deeply woven into the fabric of our lives that the concept of audience is an unnecessary addition, and sometimes a narrow-minded distortion.

正因如此，在中世纪晚期和文艺复兴时期，观众作为审美评判者的出现，在文化史上代表着如此非凡的时刻。如今，艺人们不再为上帝和国家歌唱，不再为仪式的神圣性歌唱，也不再为了其他“更高尚”的目的而歌唱，而是为听众的享受而表演——事实上，他们现在被期望取悦观众——在这种新的共生关系中，音乐发生了巨大的变化。“发展是在反复试验中推进的，”中世纪学者HJ Chaytor解释说，“观众是……的手段。”实验。”这些面对面的接触成为了艺术判断的来源，尤其是因为“中世纪文学很少产生我们意义上的正式批评。如果一个作家想知道他的作品是好是坏，他会在观众面前试写；如果得到了认可，很快就会有模仿者效仿。”这对我们来说似乎是简单的常识，但在一个长期服从宗教权威并接受君权神授的等级社会中，这是一种颠覆性的变化。如果发展到极端——这不可避免地会发生——它把未受教育的人群、被鄙视的乌合之众变成了受认可的审美裁决者。这是流行文化流行的颠覆性时刻。今天，我们仍然生活在这种转变的后果之中^。5

That’s why the emergence of the audience as the judge of aesthetic merit during the late medieval period and Renaissance represents such an extraordinary moment in cultural history. Instead of singing for God and country, for the sanctity of the ritual, or for some other ‘higher’ purpose, entertainers now performed for the enjoyment of listeners—in fact, were now expected to please their audience—and the music changed dramatically in this new symbiotic relationship. “Development proceeded by trial and error,” explains medievalist H. J. Chaytor, “the audience being the means of experiment.” These face-to-face encounters served as sources of artistic judgment, particularly since “medieval literature produced little formal criticism in our sense of the term. If an author wished to know whether his work was good or bad, he tried it on an audience; if it was approved, he was soon followed by imitators.” This seems like simple common sense to us, but in a hierarchical society that had long deferred to religious authorities and accepted the divine right of kings, this was a disruptive change. Taken to an extreme—and that would inevitably happen—it turned the untutored crowd, the despised rabble, into the sanctioned adjudicator of aesthetic matters. This was the subversive moment when pop culture got its pop. We still live with the consequences of this shift today.⁵

随着法国南部的创新传播到其他地区，这种变化的影响愈发明显。在阿拉斯，位于巴黎以北一百英里，靠近如今的比利时边境，世俗歌曲空前繁荣，这主要得益于新兴中产阶级的推动。在这个因羊毛产业而富裕起来的城市，令人惊讶的是，各种各样的人都开始唱起关于宫廷爱情、亲密情感、生活乐趣，偶尔也唱一些宗教主题的歌曲。现存的“trouvère”（情歌）歌词中，约有一半来自这个社区。在十三世纪后期，商人、职员、牧师、士兵和其他市民共同打造了法国最具活力的音乐创作中心。阿拉斯当时只有约两万人口，但这座城市可能拥有约两百名专业和业余歌手。在这个充满爱情歌曲的温室里，贵族们继续参与社区的音乐生活，但他们的数量明显少于资产阶级。

As the innovations of southern France spread elsewhere, the impact of this change became more obvious. In Arras, one hundred miles north of Paris near the present-day border with Belgium, an unprecedented blossoming of secular song took place, spurred primarily by the rising middle class. In this city, enriched by its wool industry, a surprisingly wide range of people turned to singing songs about courtly love, intimate feelings, the pleasures of life, and occasionally religious subjects. Around half of the surviving trouvère lyrics come from this single community, where merchants, clerks, priests, soldiers, and other citizens helped create the most vibrant center of music-making in France during the late thirteenth century. At a time when only around twenty thousand people lived in Arras, the city may have served as home for some two hundred professional and amateur singers. In this hothouse of amatory song, nobles continued to participate in the musical life of the community, but they were now clearly outnumbered by the bourgeoisie.

从某种程度上来说，即使在音乐文化变得更加包容之后，这些歌曲依然保持着原样。贵族的功绩和关切在接下来的几个世纪里仍然是西方流行音乐的核心。我曾对弗朗西斯·詹姆斯·查尔德在19世纪后期收集的民谣进行过统计研究，惊讶地发现其中55%的民谣聚焦于贵族气质——考虑到这些歌曲被视为平民音乐的典范，这一点就显得尤为引人注目了。这些民谣充满了骑士、公主和宫廷爱情的情调，这显得有些不合时宜。但这种痴迷的根源可以追溯到中世纪晚期和文艺复兴时期，当时下层阶级的音乐声名鹊起，但歌词中仍然保留着统治阶级的精神。也许这种做法巩固了这样一种观点，即歌手的技艺本质上是高贵的，赋予了其主要从业者精英地位。在某种程度上，这也一定是一种令人愉悦的姿态，让观众感到愉悦，提升了表演者的尊严，而就在不久之前，他们还被鄙视为低贱的歌舞伎和吟游诗人。

In some ways, the songs stayed the same even after the musical culture became more inclusive. The exploits and concerns of nobility would remain central to Western popular music for centuries to come. I once undertook a statistical study of the folk ballads collected by Francis James Child during the late nineteenth century, and was amazed to find that 55 percent of them focus on the nobility—a remarkable fact when one considers that these songs are treated as textbook examples of the music of the common people. These folk ballads are filled, in a peculiar anachronism, with knights and princesses and the sentiments of courtly love. But the groundwork for this obsession was laid in the late medieval period and Renaissance, when the lower classes gained renown for their music but still adopted the ethos of the ruling class in their lyrics. Perhaps this practice helped cement the emerging view that the craft of the singer was inherently noble, conferring on its leading practitioners an elite status. In part, it must have also been a kind of pleasing posture, delighting audiences and elevating the dignity of performers who, only a short while before, had been despised as lowly jongleurs and minstrels.

但在其他方面，音乐发生了变化，这些变化表明歌曲是如何适应受众驱动的审美要求的。我们已经看到，奴隶歌手和其他处于社会权力结构之外的音乐家经常在歌曲中使用编码语言，学者亨利·路易斯·盖茨将这种做法称为“表意”。早期的游吟诗人尽管与贵族有着更牢固的联系，但他们也经常这样做——以至于我们有时会觉得他们是在为其他知识渊博的内部人士演唱，而不是为更广泛的听众演唱。在某些情况下，能指的模糊性接近于歌词中罕见的一种前卫的不可捉摸性。鉴于此，我一点也不惊讶游吟诗人阿尔诺·丹尼尔（1150-1210）后来受到埃兹拉·庞德和其他以深奥的文本而闻名的现代主义诗人的推崇。这些更为深奥的游吟诗人歌曲，如庞德的《诗章》，旨在隐藏和揭示尽可能多的信息。如今，学者们将这种中世纪的表达风格称为“trobar clus”（特罗巴克卢斯） ，这是一种封闭的形式，其特点是刻意追求复杂和晦涩，既能将乌合之众拒之门外，又能取悦那些眼光敏锐的业内人士。但当这种演唱风格传到北方的吟游诗人和德国的吟游诗人手中时，他们摒弃了这种令人不寒而栗的傲慢，转而选择更清晰、更直接的表达方式。换句话说，他们是在为观众表演。通过这种方式以及其他方式，歌曲风格的转变反映了权力结构的变化，以及人们越来越意识到，在确保音乐家有饭吃方面，取悦观众与机构关系一样重要。

But in other ways, the music changed, and these changes demonstrate how songs were adapting to the dictates of audience-driven aesthetics. We have already seen how slave singers and other musicians outside the power structure of society have frequently employed coded language in their songs, a practice called signifying by scholar Henry Louis Gates. The early troubadours, despite their more secure links to the nobility, often did the same—so much so that we sometimes get the impression they were singing for other knowledgeable insiders, rather than for a broader audience. In some instances, the vagueness of the signifiers approaches a kind of avant-garde impenetrability rarely found in song lyrics. Given this, I’m hardly surprised that the troubadour Arnaut Daniel (1150–1210) was later championed by Ezra Pound and other modernist poets known for their difficult texts. These more recondite troubadour songs, like Pound’s Cantos, aim to conceal as much as reveal. Scholars nowadays call this medieval style of expression trobar clus, a closed form marked by deliberate complexity and obscurity that kept out the riff-raff while pleasing discerning insiders. But when this style of singing spread to the trouvères in the north and the Minnesingers of Germany, they rejected this foreboding hauteur in favor of clearer and more direct forms of expression. In other words, they were playing to the audience. In this and other ways, the shift in song styles reflected a change in the power structure along with a growing realization that pleasing the crowd could be as important as institutional affiliations in securing a musician’s next meal.

这些歌手也将讲故事作为其保留曲目的一部分，不难看出这一时期的创新为近代大众娱乐奠定了基础。这一时期的许多流行歌曲类型——莱歌、印花布歌、田园歌等等——都借鉴了如今电影和电视节目中常见的叙事技巧。在这里，吸引观众注意力的需求也占据了主导地位，塑造了表演者的艺术。艺人可以轻松地从音乐创作转换到讲故事，他们天马行空的想象力有时会产生深远的影响。这一时期最具影响力的故事讲述者克雷蒂安·德·特鲁瓦是一位训练有素的叙事家，这绝非巧合。这位法国音乐家创作的关于勇敢骑士和名门闺秀的精彩故事，将在西欧文化中留下永恒的印记，甚至可以说是他独特的创作灵感，不仅启发了英国标志性的民族故事——亚瑟王的故事，也启发了德国著名的帕西法尔故事。我想进一步说：我们可以将克雷蒂安的作品与当今的冒险大片系列联系起来，这些系列电影都以英雄事迹和永不过时的激情浪漫相结合为基础。从亚瑟王、兰斯洛特和桂妮薇儿到卢克·天行者、汉斯·索罗和莱娅公主，这并非巨大的跨越。但早在乔治·卢卡斯涉足之前，一位传奇作家就已经想出了这个秘诀。事实上，卢卡斯甚至在他的《夺宝奇兵》系列电影中引入了圣杯，这个标志首次出现在克雷蒂安的《珀西瓦尔，圣杯伯爵》（约1190年）中。无论中世纪还是现代，这种模式都满足了大众的愿望，他们要求英雄主角经历各种考验，以激发他们的个人幻想。只不过特效现在变得更好了。

These same singers also embraced storytelling as part of their repertoires, and it’s hardly a stretch to see innovations from this period laying the groundwork for the mass entertainments of more recent times. A number of popular song genres from this period—lai, chanson de toile, pastourelle, and so on—drew on the same narrative techniques that show up in movies and television shows today. Here, too, the need to hold the attention of an audience came to the forefront, shaping the performer’s art. Entertainers could shift from music-making to storytelling with surprising ease, and their leaps of imagination sometimes had far-reaching consequences. It’s hardly a coincidence that the most influential storyteller of the period, Chrétien de Troyes, was a trained trouvère. This French musician’s colorful tales of brave knights and high-born ladies would leave a lasting mark on Western European culture, so much so that he claims the unique distinction of inspiring the defining British national stories—tales of King Arthur—as well as the famous German stories about Parzival. I would go further: we can draw a direct line from Chrétien’s work to the blockbuster adventure film franchises of our own day, which build on the same combination of heroic deeds and passionate romance that never seems to go out of style. It’s not a huge leap from Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere to Luke Skywalker, Hans Solo, and Princess Leia. But a trouvère came up with the recipe long before George Lucas got into the act. In fact, Lucas even features the Holy Grail, an icon that first appears in Chrétien’s tale Perceval, le Conte du Graal (circa 1190), in his Indiana Jones films. In both medieval and modern instances, the formula serves as a type of wish-fulfillment for a mass audience, who demand that heroic protagonists go through their paces for the stimulation of their private fantasies. Only the special effects have gotten better.

你可以称之为享乐主义美学，其主要前提之一是音乐的目的是为尽可能多的人创造最大的快乐。这正是流行文化的本质，但你徒劳地寻找它。这种观点在柏拉图、亚里士多德、塞涅卡、波爱修斯、孔子、奥古斯丁，或任何其他在中世纪晚期之前的漫长世纪中，对音乐持有的受人尊敬的观点中都找不到。奥古斯丁甚至明确拒绝任何以享乐为导向的评价表演的方法：“每当歌曲比歌曲本身的情感更让我愉悦时，我就常常承认自己犯下了严重的罪孽。”换句话说，你越享受它，它就越糟糕。尽管奥古斯丁的观点完全颠覆了我们自身的价值体系，但它却是一千多年来当权者的典型观点。他们中的许多人可能容忍这类歌曲的原因与奥古斯丁为卖淫和妓院辩护的原因相同——这是基督教神学史上最令人惊讶的宣言之一——即因为它们是社会的一种排污口，吸走了罪恶的能量，如果这种排泄方式被禁止，这些能量可能会被用在更糟糕的事情上^。6

You could call this enjoyment-driven aesthetics, and one of its main premises is that music’s purpose is to create the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number of people. That’s the essence of popular culture, but you would seek in vain for this view in Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Boethius, Confucius, Augustine, or any of the other revered sources of opinion about music in the long centuries leading up to the late medieval era. Augustine even went so far as to explicitly reject any pleasure-driven method of evaluating a performance: “As often as the song pleases me more than the sense of what is sung, just so often do I confess to having sinned grievously.” In other words, the more you enjoy it, the worse it is. For all its reversal of our own value system, Augustine’s view was typical of those in positions of authority over a period of more than a thousand years. Many of them probably tolerated such songs for the same reason that Augustine defended prostitution and brothels—in one of the most surprising proclamations from the history of Christian theology—namely, because they served as a kind of sewage drain for society, siphoning off sinful energy that might be put to even worse use if this outlet were prohibited.⁶

同样，我们从这些受人尊敬的思想家那里获得的关于音乐对舞蹈的重要性的信息却寥寥无几，尽管音乐在中世纪晚期和文艺复兴时期获得了前所未有的关注。我们知道，即使在狩猎采集社会时期，肢体动作和音乐也始终相辅相成，但理论家和精英们却鲜少承认这一点，他们从音乐中寻求的不仅仅是摆动身体和跺脚的更高目的。那些抨击教区居民所唱罪恶歌曲的神职人员，也总是对经常伴随他们的舞蹈抱有敌意。很少有人记录流行舞蹈，原因与我们之前提到的相同。这类表演被认为太过不体面或粗俗，不值得保存。这就是为什么直到15世纪才出现详细的舞蹈手册。然而，早在这些“指导性”书籍出现之前，乡村舞蹈和民间舞蹈的社会地位就已经发生了转变。随着享乐主义被认可为一种艺术标准，以及群众影响力的不断增强，舞曲逐渐走出了欧洲历史的阴影。

By the same token, we have very little information from these esteemed thinkers on the importance of music for dancing, which gained unprecedented visibility during the late medieval period and Renaissance. We know that physical movement and music have always gone together, even back in the days of hunter-gathering societies, but this was hardly acknowledged by theorists and elites, who sought a higher purpose from music than just swaying bodies and tapping feet. The same clerics who attacked the sinful songs of their parishioners were invariably hostile to the dances that often accompanied them. Little effort was made to document popular dances, and for the same reasons we have already encountered. Such performances were considered too undignified or vulgar to deserve preservation. This is why no detailed dance manuals appeared until the fifteenth century. Yet long before these “how-to” books showed up, a shift in the social status of rustic and folk dances can be detected. With the acknowledgment of pleasure as an artistic standard and the growing influence of the crowd, dance music steps out of the shadows in European history.

许多最受欢迎的表演者所青睐的歌曲形式都与舞蹈有着明确的联系。这些起源通常保留在我们今天使用的音乐术语中。回旋曲现在被视为一种具有重复叠句的特定音乐形式，但该术语可能源自中世纪晚期流浪音乐家伴随回旋曲的圆形舞蹈。今天我们用颂歌这个词来描述圣诞歌曲，但它来自那个时期非常流行的舞蹈 -颂歌。从小步舞曲到华尔兹，许多其他术语现在都用于描述音乐厅音乐，但起源于舞者。我怀疑我们是否能够完全理解舞蹈对音乐风格的影响，它甚至在我们最意想不到的地方出现。查尔斯罗森在他开创性的研究“古典风格”中，对四小节乐句在古典音乐中“控制节奏结构”的过程感到惊叹，并被迫得出结论“周期性乐句与舞蹈相关，它需要一种与步骤和分组相对应的乐句模式。”换句话说，即使是莫扎特和贝多芬的精英杰作，也是随着农民的脚步而动的^。7

Many of the song forms favored by the most popular performers were explicitly connected to dances. These origins are often preserved in the musical terminology we use today. The rondo is now treated as a specifically musical form with a recurring refrain, but the term likely derives from the circular dance that accompanied the rondeau of the wandering musicians of the late medieval era. Today we use the word carol to describe a Christmas song, but it comes from a very popular dance of that period, the carole. A host of other terms, from minuet to waltz, are now used to describe concert hall music, but originated among dancers. I doubt we will ever grasp the full impact of dancing on musical style, which shows up even where we least expect to find it. Charles Rosen, in his seminal study The Classical Style, marvels over the process by which the four-bar phrase gained a “stranglehold on rhythmic structure” in classical music, and is forced to conclude that “the periodic phrase is related to the dance, with its need for a phrase pattern that corresponds to steps and to groupings.” In other words, even the elitist masterworks of Mozart and Beethoven move to the beat of the peasants’ feet.⁷

在舞蹈音乐中，我们看到了当时音乐文化中标志性的消除社会隔阂和对令人畏惧的外来者的效仿。“尤其是卡罗尔舞，社会各阶层——国王、贵族、牧羊人和女仆——都会跳，”音乐学者罗伯特·穆拉利解释说。他从流传至今的零散文本和图像中，出色地挽救了这种舞蹈的细节。“它被描述为在室内和室外都进行，”他指出，并且在种类繁多的文学作品中都有提及，不仅有“虚构文本，还有历史（或准历史）著作、道德论文，甚至还有天文学著作。”我们或许永远无法知晓这种舞蹈的起源。正如穆拉利指出的那样，学者们通常更关注“卡罗尔舞”一词的词源，而不是舞蹈本身。但世俗舞蹈似乎往往源自那些预示着那个时代音乐创新的非欧洲来源。当时在欧洲盛行的圆圈舞与非洲侨民最持久、传播最广的仪式——环喊舞——有着相似之处。莫里斯舞，被尊崇为英国本土传统，其名称本身就与“摩尔人”的起源息息相关。鉴于资料匮乏，我们很难对此进行深入的推测。但总体而言，毋庸置疑：这些曾经被视为罪恶、被边缘化的平民舞蹈如今已被宽恕，并获得了艺术的合法性。颠覆性的力量正在进入主流。更妙的是，农民和文盲也能像骑士和名门淑女一样轻松地欣赏这种艺术^。8

In dance music we see the same leveling of social barriers and emulation of feared outsiders that marks the musical culture of the time. “The carole, in particular, was performed by all classes of society—kings and nobles, shepherds and servant girls,” explains music scholar Robert Mullally, who has done exceptional work rescuing the details of this dance from the scattered texts and images that have survived to our time. “It is described as taking place both indoor and outdoors,” he notes, and is mentioned in a surprising range of literary works, not only “fictional texts, but also in historical (or quasi-historical) writings, in moral treatises and even in a work of astronomy.” We may never know how this dance originated. As Mullally points out, scholars have typically focused more attention on the etymology of the word carole than on the actual dance. But it seems likely that secular dances often came from the same non-European sources that anticipated the musical innovations of this era. The circular dances that gained ascendancy in Europe at this time reveal similarities to the ring shout, the most persistent and far-traveling ritual of the African diaspora. And in the Morris dance, so revered as a homegrown British tradition, we find a specific reference to “Moorish” antecedents in its very name. Given the paucity of source materials, we can hardly go beyond idle speculation on these matters. But of the big picture there is no room for doubt: the previously sinful and marginalized dances of the populace are now forgiven and gain legitimacy as art. The subversive enters the mainstream. Even better, this is art that can be enjoyed by peasants and the illiterate just as easily as by knights and highborn ladies.⁸

总体而言，西方音乐生活发生了令人震惊的变化。但它们也挑战了我们对文化史的传统划分。这些大胆的中世纪歌手和舞者早已预见了文艺复兴时期的大多数创新。这令我们的模式和体系感到尴尬。音乐文化似乎领先于视觉艺术和哲学体系，并几乎像军事滩头阵地一样，确立了未来的人文主义精神。早在社会其他阶层赶上他们之前，音乐家们就已经确立了世俗文化的合法性、社会等级的平衡、对艺术家的偶像化、市场和赞助体系的运作，以及最重要的，面对体制要求，他们自信地维护了个人的创作自由。

In aggregate, these are stunning changes in the musical life of the West. But they also challenge our traditional demarcations of cultural history. These daring medieval singers and dancers already anticipate most of the innovations typically assigned to the Renaissance. This is an embarrassment to our schemas and systems. The musical culture seems to rush ahead of the visual arts and philosophical systems, and establishes, almost as a kind of military beachhead, the humanistic ethos of the future. Long before the rest of society catches up with them, the musicians have already asserted the legitimacy of secular culture, the leveling of social hierarchies, the idolization of the artist, the workings of a marketplace and patronage system, and, most important of all, the confident assertion of the individual’s creative freedom in the face of institutional demands.

然而，我对这一切并不感到惊讶。我坚信，歌曲在某种程度上相当于经济学家所说的“领先指标”。那些从事这门令人沮丧的科学的人已经认识到，某些统计数据——建筑许可、招聘广告、新屋开工等等——可以作为未来经济趋势的预测指标。相比之下，其他信息来源——例如企业利润——则充当滞后指标，有助于厘清近期发生的事情。在社会历史领域，音乐是所有指标中最有力的领先指标。只要看看20世纪20年代蓝调歌曲的歌词是如何预示了后来的性革命（提前了40年！），或者20世纪50年代，痴迷于爵士乐的“垮掉一代”的生活习惯，以及他们如何被一小群亚文化群体所接受，为20世纪60年代末和70年代的青年运动定下了基调。这种对新行为方式的敏感度根植于音乐艺术之中，原因很简单，这正是我们对歌手的期望。我们希望他们高度敏感，能够感知微妙的情感脉络，如同社会群体的中枢神经系统。早在论文和社论关注即将到来的变革之前，他们就已经被赋予了音乐的内涵。

Yet I am hardly surprised by all of this. I’m convinced that songs are a kind of cultural equivalent of what economists call “leading indicators.” Those practitioners of the dismal science have learned that certain statistics—building permits, help-wanted ads, housing starts, and the like—can be relied on as predictors of future economic trends. In contrast, other sources of information—for example, corporate profits—serve as lagging indicators, helping to clarify what happened in the recent past. In the sphere of social history, music is the most powerful leading indicator of them all. Just look at how the lyrics of 1920s blues songs anticipated the later sexual revolution (forty years in advance!), or how the lifestyle habits of jazz-obsessed beatniks, embraced by a tiny subculture in the 1950s, set the tone for the youth movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. This sensitivity to new ways of behaving is embedded into the musical arts, and for the simple reason that this is what we expect from our singers. We want them to be hypersensitive, attuned to subtle emotional currents, a kind of central nervous system for the social body. Long before treatises and editorials pick up on the coming changes, they have already been set to music.

14

14

行为不端的音乐家

Musicians Behaving Badly

按照我们传统的时间线，文艺复兴正式兴起于十四世纪下半叶，它仅仅是为了提升曾经被鄙视的音乐家如今享有的声望和权力。这最明显的例子是，人们对杰出艺术家（无论音乐还是其他领域）的崇敬之情油然而生，几乎成了个人崇拜。我们早已在那些关于游吟诗人、吟游诗人、吟游诗人和其他表演者的精彩故事中领略过这种氛围。但对于文艺复兴的继承者来说，这种对音乐家及其私生活的八卦式关注，却发展成了近乎名人崇拜的现象。

The Renaissance, which makes its official appearance in the second half of the fourteenth century, according to our conventional timelines, serves merely to amplify the prestige and power now enjoyed by the once despised musician. This is most noticeable in the awestruck deference, almost a cult of personality, inspired by leading artists, musical or otherwise. We have already tasted this in the breathless tales of the exploits of troubadours, trouvères, Minnesingers, and other performers. But for their Renaissance successors, this gossipy fixation on musicians and their private lives grows into something approaching celebrity worship.

伟大的艺术家如今被允许无视他人必须遵守的法律和惯例。事实上，他们也应该这样做。许多读者会去阅读本韦努托·切利尼的自传——这是我们了解文艺复兴时期艺术家生平的最佳资料——因为它详细地描述了他作为金匠、雕塑家、音乐家和诗人的经历。但我们也能从它对犯罪与惩罚的深刻见解中汲取教训，尤其是作者在犯下前者的同时规避后者的技巧。据我统计，切利尼承认了十四项罪行。在他的自传中，他列举了各种暴力犯罪，以及一系列较轻的违法行为，包括敲诈勒索和故意破坏。但这些违法行为均未受到当局的惩罚。切利尼曾两次入狱，但仅仅是因为他与权势赞助人意见不合。相比之下，对于一个拥有罕见天赋的人来说，谋杀和严重袭击却被容忍。我最喜欢的一段切利尼回忆录描述了当一位顾问建议惩罚这位艺术家的谋杀行为时，教皇的反应。“你不像我那么了解这件事，”教皇回答道。“你应该知道，像本韦努托这样在其职业中独一无二的人，不需要受到法律的约束。” ¹

Great artists were now allowed to ignore laws and conventions that others had to obey. Indeed, they were expected to do so. Many readers turn to the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini—our single best source of what the life of a Renaissance artist was like—for its details on his work as goldsmith, sculptor, musician, and poet. But we can also learn from the insights it provides into crime and punishment, especially its author’s skill in committing the former while evading the latter. By my count, Cellini confesses to fourteen different violent crimes in the course of his autobiography—as well as a host of lesser infractions, including extortion and vandalism. But none of these transgressions were punished by the authorities. Cellini was incarcerated twice, but only as a result of his disagreements with powerful patrons. Murder and aggravated assault, in contrast, were tolerated from an individual with his rare gifts. My favorite passage from Cellini’s memoir describes the pope’s reaction when an adviser suggests that the artist ought to be punished for committing a murder. “You don’t understand the matter as well as I do,” the pontiff responds. “You should know that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, need not be subject to the law.”¹

在这段历史中，我曾详细论述音乐与暴力之间反复出现的联系。但在大多数情况下，音乐家都是受害者或旁观者。然而，在中世纪晚期，随着社会地位的上升，演奏者常常沦为施暴者。正如我们所见，雅克·阿塔利认为，音乐厅的仪式可以作为一种祭祀暴力的仪式化替代品，而这一观察或许有助于我们理解早期音乐的文化意义。但研究文艺复兴时期音乐的人几乎无需在艺术家的作品中寻找隐藏的暴力象征。在许多情况下，他们确实犯下了袭击和谋杀的罪行。巴托洛梅奥·特龙邦奇诺是他那个时代的杰出音乐家之一，以其轻柔的流行歌曲——弗罗托拉（frottolas）而闻名，这些歌曲预示了后来牧歌的兴起。但特龙邦奇诺的恶名在他因嫉妒而杀害妻子后才更加臭名昭著。当音乐爱好者们得知他的浪漫情愫背后竟隐藏着如此强烈的激情时，或许会觉得他的情歌更加真实可信。他的罪行似乎毋庸置疑，但特龙邦奇诺却逍遥法外。卡洛·杰苏阿尔多，这位最杰出的牧歌作曲家之一，比特龙邦奇诺更残暴，他谋杀了妻子和她高贵的情人——安德里亚公爵，并肢解了他们的尸体。目击者看到他走进公寓，高喊：“杀了那个恶棍，连同他的娼妇！杰苏阿尔多难道要被戴绿帽吗？” 片刻之后，他双手沾满鲜血，离开了。然后他低声说道：“我不相信他们死了，”然后他第二次走进公寓，给受害者们造成更多伤害。在其他情况下，杰苏阿尔多也为他来之不易的残暴名声锦上添花，一些评论家毫不犹豫地将他贴上虐待狂或精神病患者的标签。“随便你怎么评价杰苏阿尔多，”音乐评论家亚历克斯·罗斯评论道。“他真是个无可辩驳的恶棍。”然而，他从未因其罪行受到惩罚，或许他作为作曲家的魅力源于他作为情人的暴力^。2

In this history, I have dwelt on the recurring linkage between music and violence. But in most cases, musicians have been victims or bystanders. Yet after their rise in social status in the late medieval era, performers frequently turn into perpetrators. As we have seen, Jacques Attali has suggested that the observances of the concert hall can serve as a kind of ritualized substitute for sacrificial violence, and that observation may help us understand the cultural significance of the music of this earlier age. But the student of Renaissance music hardly needs to look for hidden symbols of violence in artists’ compositions. In a number of cases, they committed actual assaults and murders. Bartolomeo Tromboncino was one of the leading musicians of his day, famous for his frottolas, gentle popular songs that anticipated the later rise of the madrigal. But Tromboncino’s notoriety was only enhanced when he murdered his wife in a jealous rage. Music lovers may even have found his love songs all the more authentic when they learned that his romantic attachments came packaged with such violent passions. His guilt seems never to have been in doubt, but Tromboncino went unpunished for the crime. Carlo Gesualdo, one of the finest composers of madrigals, went even further than Tromboncino, murdering both his wife and her noble lover, the Duke of Andria, and mutilating their bodies. Witnesses saw him enter the apartment exclaiming, “Kill that scoundrel, along with his harlot! Shall Gesualdo be made a cuckold?” and leave a short while later with blood dripping from his hands. Then he muttered, “I do not believe they are dead,” and went in the apartment a second time, to inflict more wounds on his victims. In other instances, Gesualdo burnished this hard-earned reputation for brutality, and some commentators have not hesitated to label him a sadist or a psychopath. “Say what you will about Gesualdo,” notes the music critic Alex Ross. “He was irrefutably badass.” Yet he was never punished for his crimes, and probably found his allure as a composer got a boost from his violence as a lover.²

但文艺复兴时期的艺术家无需谋杀公爵来证明，在新的游戏规则下，他们不再向贵族卑躬屈膝。切利尼的例子表明，艺术家甚至可以巧妙地智胜教皇和国王，挑拨赞助人之间的矛盾，并在现任赞助人变得过于苛刻或吝啬时转向新的赞助人。在这方面，文艺复兴时期城邦、王国和教会领地政治控制权的碎片化，使得平衡倾向于艺术家，艺术家可以轻易地转移阵地——并通过转移到另一个司法管辖区来逃避犯罪的法律后果。然而，即使在赞助人和艺术家之间持续不断的斗争中，观众也扮演着至关重要的角色。当切利尼与科西莫·德·美第奇就这位艺术家最具雄心的作品——如今仍悬挂在佛罗伦萨领主广场的那幅著名的《珀尔修斯与美杜莎头像》（Perseus with the Head of Medusa） ——发生各种争执时，两人都密切关注着旁观者和路人的评论。科西莫甚至躲在广场的一扇窗户后面，先听取人群的评价，然后再发表自己的意见。“公众”（我们今天称之为“公众”）的重要性如此之高，以至于即使是强大的统治者也会顺从他们的意愿和偏好。

But Renaissance artists didn’t need to murder a duke to prove that, under the new rules of the game, they no longer kowtowed to nobility. As the example of Cellini makes clear, an artist could skillfully outmaneuver even pontiffs and kings, playing patrons against each other, and moving on to a new benefactor whenever the current one grew too demanding or parsimonious. In this regard, the fragmentation of political control in a patchwork of Renaissance city-states, kingdoms, and ecclesiastical territories helped tilt the balance in favor of the artist, who could easily shift allegiances—and avoid legal consequences for crimes committed—by moving to another jurisdiction. Yet even in this ongoing battle between patron and artist, the audience played a crucial part. When Cellini was engaged in various disputes with Cosimo de’ Medici over the artist’s most ambitious work, the now-famous Perseus with the Head of Medusa, still visible in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, both paid the closest attention to comments from onlookers and passersby. Cosimo even hid behind a window in the plaza to hear the verdict of the crowd before venturing his own opinion. Such was the importance of the ‘general public’ (as we would call it today) that even powerful rulers deferred to its whims and preferences.

在人们对充满激情、讨喜的艺术家们的普遍迷恋中，我们邂逅了西方音乐的第一位巨星。作曲家若斯坎·德普雷出生于1450年左右，他所引发的英雄崇拜达到了基督教音乐史上前所未有的程度，而他去世后的几年里，他的声望更是一路飙升。托斯卡纳外交官科西莫·巴托利（Cosimo Bartoli，1503-1572）将若斯坎比作米开朗基罗——这无疑是对一位若斯坎去世后，年轻的作曲家们为他谱写了充满崇高赞誉的挽歌，让·里沙福特也为他的已故老师写了一整部安魂曲。不到二十年，他的卓越地位就得到了马丁·路德的肯定，马丁·路德声称其他作曲家必须服务于音符，但只有若斯坎可以强迫他们按照他的意愿去做。此前没有任何作曲家，即使是最著名的，如纪尧姆·杜费和约翰内斯·奥克冈，获得过如此赞誉。然而，若斯坎影响力最引人注目的可能是被错误地归于他的作品数量——出版商乔治·福斯特后来开玩笑说，若斯坎有一种独特的本领，他死后创作的音乐比生前还多。他的权威如此强大，以至于若斯坎这个名字成为了一种品牌名称或卓越的标志，而不是作品起源的适当归属。

Amidst this widespread fascination with passionate and crowd-pleasing artists, we encounter the first superstar of Western music. The composer Josquin des Prez, born around the year 1450, attracted hero worship to a degree previously unknown in Christian music, and his renown mounted even higher in the years following his death. The Tuscan diplomat Cosimo Bartoli (1503–1572) compared Josquin to Michelangelo—an extraordinary admission for a Florentine patriot—and Swiss humanist Heinrich Glarean (1488–1563) viewed the esteemed composer as the equal of Virgil. After Josquin’s death, younger composers penned dirges in his honor filled with lofty praise, and Jean Richafort wrote an entire requiem mass for his deceased master. Before two decades had elapsed, his preeminence was asserted by no less an authority than Martin Luther, who claimed that other composers must serve the musical notes, but only Josquin could force them to do as he willed. No previous composer, even the most celebrated, such as Guillaume Dufay and Johannes Ockeghem, had gained such acclaim. Yet the most striking measure of Josquin’s impact may be the sheer number of works falsely attributed to him—publisher George Forster later joked that Josquin had the unique skill of composing more music after he died than while alive. So powerful was his authority that the name Josquin became a kind of brand name or stamp of excellence rather than a proper attribution of a work’s origins.

在这里，我们看到了同样的合法化和主流化过程，这也是本书反复出现的主题。若斯坎生前因其难以驾驭、易怒的行为而饱受批评，人们对他音乐的钦佩也因对他叛逆方式的恼怒而有所减弱。格拉里安援引了那些与若斯坎私交甚笃的人的证词，在赞扬与承认之间取得平衡，承认这位作曲家“并未冷静地压抑其桀骜不驯的脾气中迸发出的暴力冲动”。他继续承认，“对新奇事物的过度热爱”有时会损害这位作曲家的作品，以及“过分渴望因与众不同而赢得些许荣耀”。现存的少数关于若斯坎个性的描述之一，出现在他写给费拉拉公爵埃尔科莱一世的一封信中。信中警告这位雄心勃勃的艺术赞助人，不要雇佣这样一个脾气暴躁、要求苛刻的人。在这篇揭示真相的文章中，歌手吉安·德·阿蒂加诺瓦（Gian de Artiganova）暗示，尽管海因里希·伊萨克（Heinrich Isaac）的才华不如他，但他会是更好的选择。据这位观察家所说，伊萨克被认为“性格更温和友善，而且他会更频繁地创作新作品”。若斯坎（Josquin）的作曲确实更好，但他是自己想作的时候才作，而不是别人想让他作的时候，而且他要价200达克特。薪水是 100，而艾萨克的薪水是 120——但大人会做出决定。”公爵确实做出了有利于若斯坎的决定，这一事件证明了音乐巨星在新规则下有多么叛逆，也证明了顾客为了获得他们的服务愿意容忍多少^。3

Here we see the same process of legitimization and mainstreaming that is a recurring theme in this book. During his lifetime, Josquin was criticized for his difficult, prickly behavior, and admiration for his music was tempered by irritation at his rebellious ways. Glarean, who drew on the testimony of those who knew Josquin personally, balances his praise with the admission that the composer did not “soberly repress the violent impulses of his unbridled temperament.” He goes on to admit that “an immoderate love of novelty” sometimes marred the composer’s works, as well as “an excessive eagerness to win a little glory for being unusual.” One of the few surviving descriptions of Josquin’s personality from his own time shows up in a letter to Duke Ercole I of Ferrara. It warns the duke, an ambitious patron of the arts, against hiring such a cantankerous, demanding individual. In this revealing text, singer Gian de Artiganova suggests that Heinrich Isaac would be a better choice, even though he was the inferior talent. Isaac was deemed “more good-natured and companionable,” according to this observer, “and he will compose new works more often. It is true that Josquin composes better, but he composes when he wants to, and not when one wants him to, and he is asking 200 ducats in salary while Isaac will come for 120—but Your Lordship will decide.” The duke did decide, in favor of Josquin, and the incident testifies both to how rebellious musical superstars could be under the new rules and to how much patrons were willing to tolerate in order to engage their services.³

如今，音乐界出现了一种紧张的局面，并将持续到我们未来的历史。即使音乐家成为圈内人士，他们也必须像局外人一样行事。这必然会引发摩擦，有时甚至会公开挑起不和。但从长远来看，艺术上的远见卓识者几乎总能胜出——其他力量在创造性特权面前不得不退让——而且，他们往往也因一路走来所造成的混乱和冲突而更加受人敬仰。

A tension now comes to the forefront in music that will continue for the rest of our history. Even when musicians become insiders, they are expected to act like outsiders. This invariably creates friction, and sometimes open discord. But over the long run, the artistic visionary almost always prevails—other powers must retreat in the face of creative prerogatives—and is often admired all the more for the disruptions and conflicts caused along the way.

公众品味的上升也催生了我们现在称之为流行歌曲标准曲目的雏形。“15世纪的后25年发生了一件奇怪的事情，”文艺复兴时期音乐学者艾伦·W·阿特拉斯（Allan W. Atlas）解释道。“大约有十几首香颂被创作出来，它们在当时和之后两代作曲家（以及可能还有听众）的心中获得了‘热门’地位，并衍生出大约三百首新作品……虽然其中一些衍生作品是弥撒曲，但绝大多数都是世俗的。”大量新作品以海恩·范·吉泽汉（Hayne van Ghizeghem）创作的歌曲《De tous biens plaine》（一首关于情人美丽情妇的歌曲）为基础，不同的作曲家将其融入到五十多首新作品中，其中包括颂扬圣母玛利亚的宗教音乐。约翰内斯·奥克冈的《孤独》（Fors seulement）是一位心碎的叙述者等待死亡的哀歌，它出现在至少五首弥撒曲和三十多首世俗歌曲中。《武装的人》（L'homme armé）是一首来源不明的歌曲，它警告听众提防危险的“武装人员”，出现在四十多首圣歌弥撒曲中，其中包括若斯坎的两首。如果如我之前所言，当一首歌曲的不洁起源被统治机构挪用后，其合法化过程达到顶峰，甚至被遗忘，那么这些被改造的爱与暴力歌曲几乎是这一净化过程实践的教科书式范例。有时，这些源于情欲的这些旋律被如此精心地融入其新的神圣语境，以至于其丑闻的起源几乎销声匿迹。这些经过净化的版本本身便成为了典范，如今在西方文化史册中，它们作为宗教音乐的典范，享有崇高的地位^。4

The new ascendancy of public tastes also resulted in the first stirrings of what we would now call a standard repertoire of popular songs. “A curious thing happened in the third quarter of the fifteenth century,” explains Renaissance music scholar Allan W. Atlas. “About a dozen or so chansons were written that gained such ‘hit’ status with other composers (and presumably with audiences) during their own and the next two generations that they generated about three hundred new compositions.… While some of the derivative works were Mass settings, the overwhelming majority were secular.” Hosts of new works were built on the foundations of “De tous biens plaine,” a song about a lover’s beautiful mistress attributed to Hayne van Ghizeghem, which various composers incorporated into more than fifty new pieces, including sacred music honoring the Virgin Mary. Johannes Ockeghem’s “Fors seulement,” the lament of a heartbroken narrator awaiting death, found its way into at least five masses and more than thirty secular songs. “L’homme armé,” a song of unclear origins that warns listeners against a dangerous “armed man,” shows up in more than forty sung masses, including two by Josquin. If, as I have suggested earlier, the process of legitimization reaches its peak when the unclean origins of a song are obscured, or even forgotten, after its appropriation by ruling institutions, these transformed songs of love and violence present almost textbook examples of what this cleansing process looks like in practice. Sometimes these lust-born melodies were so carefully integrated into their new sacred contexts that their scandalous origins all but disappeared from view. The purified versions would serve as role models in their own right, and today enjoy a cherished position in the annals of Western culture as paragons of religious music.⁴

十四世纪中叶，音乐家开始更频繁地出现在欧洲城市的工资单上。这些表演者可能在世俗和宗教场合都演奏过，但城市化改变了教会权威的权力平衡，为音乐家创造了新的机会。到1300年，欧洲许多主要城市的居民人数已达十万甚至更多，但其他数十个城市的人口也只有几万。这些地方的市议会如今已成为音乐家的重要雇主，依靠他们提供实际服务以及盛大的仪式。以法国南部的蒙彼利埃市为例，当时该市的记录经常提到“我们的五位吟游诗人”，他们定期获得报酬和正式制服，偶尔还会获得新乐器。这些表演者的服装包括精美的装饰，例如毛皮衬里或绣在袖子上的城市徽章，旨在给民众留下深刻印象。吟游诗人陪同市议会参加游行，并在重要场合演出。事实上，许多活动都需要他们的出席——包括接待皇室成员、在塔楼安装钟、弓弩手比赛或展示圣物。许多场合都带有宗教性质，尤其是节日或圣诞节游行，但这些音乐家们却是为了彰显市政官员（以及他们自己的官员——想想他们耀眼的服饰就知道了）的重要性，甚至高于当地教会官员。有时，我们甚至能发现主教和城市领导人之间为了从他们的音乐随行人员那里获得声望而展开的竞争。

In the mid-fourteenth century, musicians started appearing on the payrolls of European cities with greater frequency. These performers might have played in both secular and sacred contexts, but urbanization had shifted the balance of power away from church authorities and created new opportunities for musicians. By 1300, many major cities in Europe boasted one hundred thousand or more inhabitants, but dozens of other communities had populations in the tens of thousands. The city councils in these locales now emerged as significant employers of musicians, relying on them for practical services as well as pomp and ceremony. Take, for example, the city of Montpellier in southern France, where city records from the period frequently refer to “our five minstrels,” musicians who received regular payments and formal uniforms for their services, and occasionally new instruments. The livery of these performers included fancy trappings, such as fur linings or the city’s coat of arms embroidered on their sleeves, and was designed to impress the populace. The minstrels accompanied the city council in processions and performed on important occasions. Indeed, a remarkable number of events required their presence—including the reception of royalty, the mounting of a bell in a tower, a competition among crossbowmen, or the display of a holy relic. Many of the occasions were religious in nature, especially feast days or Christmas processions, but the musicians served to assert the importance of civic officials (as well as their own—just consider their dazzling attire), even above that of the local church functionaries. At times we can even detect a competition between bishops and city leaders in their attempts to gain prestige from their musical entourages.

其他因素也促进了音乐家在市场经济中议价能力的增强。在法国，音乐行会开始形成：1321年在巴黎，1353年在蒙彼利埃，1354年在亚眠1461 年在伦敦，1484 年在鲁昂，1492 年在图卢兹。1472 年，伦敦音乐家从爱德华四世手中获得了皇家特许状，英国其他社区很快效仿了这种结构，既为当地表演者提供了安全保障，也限制了流浪吟游诗人的入侵。德国的名歌手在这一时期为表演者创建了类似的组织结构。虽然这些歌手喜欢夸耀自己的古老起源——将他们的历史追溯到早已逝世的吟游诗人甚至旧约先知的时代——但很明显，他们的形成和影响实际上与 14 和 15 世纪城市日益增长的经济实力有关。

Other factors contributed as well to the growing bargaining power of musicians in a market economy. In France music guilds began to form: in Paris in 1321, in Montpellier in 1353, in Amiens in 1461, in Rouen in 1484, and in Toulouse in 1492. The musicians of London gained a royal charter for their guild in 1472 from Edward IV, and other communities in Britain soon imitated this structure, which both provided security for local performers and limited the incursions of wandering minstrels. The Meistersingers in Germany created a similar organizational structure for performers during this period. Although these singers liked to make grand claims for their ancient origins—tracing their history back to long-dead bards or even the times of the Old Testament prophets—it’s clear that their formation and influence were actually linked to the growing economic power of cities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

这种原本孤立的表演者之间新的群体凝聚力有时也付出了沉重的代价。例如，名歌手协会（Meistersingers）与其说是一个艺术合作社，不如说更像是一个官僚机构。他们的“律表”（ Tabulatur，或称“律表”）充斥着晦涩难懂的规则，控制着他们技艺的方方面面：词语的押韵、一行中允许的音节数量、歌手可以喘息的位置、表演者对圣经文本的忠实度等等。因此，著名的“名歌手”歌唱比赛往往奖励的是避免错误，而不是艺术表达的技巧。这些规则的合理性往往显得武断：纽伦堡现存的一份“律表”甚至解释说，一行的适当长度与一天的时长有关。可以想象，观众通常对这种僵硬的音乐制度化以及“名歌手”歌曲中带有的说教语气漠不关心。行会的记录中充斥着对公众缺乏兴趣的抱怨，这通常被归咎于道德败坏和举止失礼。在改革的压力下，名歌手最终接受了新的旋律和世俗主​​题，我们也从中看到了观众在音乐领域日益增长的影响力。然而，到了16世纪，名歌手们却走向衰落：他们变革太慢，太多的表演者墨守成规。在这种情况下，我们看到了艺术失去颠覆性锋芒、变得过于安逸所带来的危险。在其作为统治机构支柱的角色中。然而，在其崛起时期，这些组织享有的权力和威望证明了表演者日益增长的稳定性和影响力，而在早期，他们过着不安全、四处漂泊的生活。

This new group cohesion among previously isolated performers sometimes came at a heavy price. The Meistersingers, for example, often acted more like a bureaucracy than an artistic cooperative. Their Tabulatur (or law-book) was filled with arcane rules controlling every aspect of their craft: the rhyming of words, the number of syllables allowed in a line, the places where a singer could take a breath, a performer’s fidelity to approved biblical texts, and other such matters. As a result, the famous singing contests of the Meistersingers tended to reward the avoidance of mistakes rather than skill in artistic expression. The justifications for these rules often seem arbitrary: a surviving Tabulatur from Nuremberg goes so far as to explain that the proper length of a line was connected to the duration of a day. As might be imagined, audiences were often indifferent to this rigid institutionalization of music, as well as to the moralizing tone of the songs of the Meistersingers. Records from the guilds include numerous complaints about the lack of interest among the public, which is usually blamed on deteriorating morals and bad manners. Under pressure to reform, the Meistersingers eventually embraced new melodies and secular subjects, and here, too, we see the growing power of the audience in musical matters. By the sixteenth century, however, the Meistersingers were in decline: they were too slow to change, and too many performers clung to the old rules. In such cases, we see the dangers when artistry loses its subversive edge and grows too comfortable in its role as prop to ruling institutions. Yet during their period of ascendancy, these organizations enjoyed a power and prestige that testifies to the growing stability and influence of performers, who, in an earlier day, led insecure, wandering lives.

到了这个阶段，我们或许会忍不住宣称音乐史的“黑暗时代”已经结束。如今，种类繁多的表演风格——即使是那些曾经被粗俗、无知和文盲所接受的、带有罪恶感的曲调——都已被记录、记录下来并合法化——或许我最好就此结束我的书。如果所有表演风格都被赋予同等的地位和尊严，历史学家如何探索那些隐藏在社会边缘的音乐，那些被轻视、被排除在严肃思考之外的歌曲？还有什么空间留给颠覆性的音乐史呢？

By this stage, we might be tempted to declare that the ‘Dark Ages’ of music history were over. With such a wide range of performing styles now documented, notated, and legitimized—even those previously sinful tunes embraced by the vulgar, untutored, and illiterate—I am perhaps best advised to conclude my book at this juncture. How can a historian explore the music hidden in the margins of society, those despised songs excluded from serious consideration, if all styles of performance are granted equal status and dignity? Is there any room left for a subversive history of music?

啊，但这种看似民主的音乐化不过是幻象。即使在文艺复兴的曙光照亮了著名演奏家的艺术之后，欧洲的大部分音乐创作仍然处于黑暗之中。日常生活沉浸在如今已失传的音乐声响之中。无数歌曲因被认为不够精致或庄重而未能被记录下来：劳动号子、摇篮曲、民间音乐、游戏和教学旋律等等。在其他情况下，整个音乐类别都很少被讨论，因为它们被认为过于罪恶或亵渎神明，不宜保存。这些音乐包括妓女的迷人歌曲、所谓女巫和迷信黑魔法信徒的音乐咒语，以及其他亵渎神明的旋律。

Ah, but this apparent democratization of music is an illusion. Even after the dawn of the Renaissance illuminated the artistry of famous performers, most of the music-making in Europe still remained in the dark. Daily life was immersed in musical sounds now lost to us. Countless songs escaped documentation because they were considered insufficiently refined or dignified: work songs, lullabies, folk music, melodies for games and pedagogy, and the like. In other instances, entire categories of music were seldom discussed, because they were considered too sinful or blasphemous for preservation. These would include the beguiling songs of prostitutes, the musical incantations of so-called witches and superstitious believers in dark arts, and other profane melodies.

有时，丑闻会发展到需要记录的程度，而这些罕见的事件构成了文化史上最引人入胜的篇章——尽管即使是这些戏剧性的案例也很少从音乐的角度来探讨。例如，16 和 17 世纪在意大利爆发的塔兰泰舞通常被视为群体性歇斯底里症的例子。整个社区都被一种对舞蹈的狂热所淹没，参与者认为他们的强迫性动作是蜘蛛咬伤造成的——据说，被称为塔兰泰拉舞的舞蹈就源于这种错觉。由于这种音乐狂热与医学相关，一些清醒的研究人员，例如正如阿塔纳修斯·基歇尔和弗朗西斯科·坎切列里认为有理由记录这种现象一样。但在这些世纪中，许多其他非传统的音乐实践肯定也蓬勃发展，但却无人记录下它们的奇特之处。同一时代的卢丹地区也是如此，那里的一座法国修女修道院进行着极其荒唐的表演，表面上是在恶魔的影响下。官方的编年史家可能也没有注意到这一点，但成千上万的旁观者聚集在一起，观看被魔鬼附身的修女们性感的旋转，以及神父们试图驱除导致她们滑稽动作的黑暗灵魂。在这里，就像在当时的许多其他表演场合一样，观众的反应决定了谁会受到关注和庆祝。人们不禁要问，还有多少其他人，在历史上没有记录下来，参与了此类“表演”，后来却将其归咎于魔鬼。

On occasion, a scandal would grow so large that it demanded documentation, and these rare incidents offer some of the most fascinating chapters in cultural history—although even these dramatic cases are rarely considered from a musical perspective. For example, the outbreaks of tarantism in Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are generally dealt with as examples of mass hysteria. Whole communities were overcome by a mania for dancing, with participants believing that their compulsive movements resulted from a spider bite—the dance known as the tarantella is said to have originated from this delusion. Because of the medical associations of this musical frenzy, sober researchers such as Athanasius Kircher and Francesco Cancellieri felt justified in writing about the phenomenon. But many other unconventional musical practices must have flourished during these centuries without anyone documenting their peculiarities. The same is true of the Loudun possessions of this same era, which found a convent of French nuns engaging in the most scandalous performances, ostensibly under the influence of demons. This, too, might have passed unnoticed by official chroniclers, except that thousands of onlookers gathered to watch the sexualized gyrations of the bedeviled sisters, as well as the attempts of priests to exorcise the dark spirits responsible for their antics. Here, as in so many other performance settings of the time, the responses of the audience dictated who got noticed and celebrated. One wonders how many other people, unremarked by history, engaged in ‘performances’ of this sort and later blamed them on the devil.

然而，即使是日常生活中最平和、最普遍的音乐也注定会被遗忘，几乎消失得无影无踪。在同一时期，漫步在城镇集市的任何人都能听到商贩们歌颂他们的商品。作曲家们常常从这些优美的推销歌声中获得灵感，这些歌声正是我们现代广告歌谣的前身。十三世纪蒙彼利埃抄本中的一首佚名经文歌中，男高音部分高呼“新鲜草莓！野黑莓！”大约在同一时期，诗人纪尧姆·德·维尔纳夫编纂了一部巴黎的呼喊集，十四世纪佛罗伦萨作曲家弗朗切斯科·兰迪尼也创作了一部以这些同样不起眼的主题为灵感的作品。克莱门特·雅内金（Clément Janequin）或许是这一合法化进程中最著名的例子，他将数十首这样的旋律融入了他的四部声乐作品《Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris》。但有多少街头歌曲最终进入了古典音乐经典，却没有留下任何血统痕迹？我们知道亨德尔曾承认，他从街头歌手那里借鉴了音乐灵感，许多其他作曲家也一定做过类似的事情，即使只是无意识的。

Yet even the most inoffensive and pervasive music of day-to-day life was doomed for oblivion, disappearing with hardly a trace left behind. Anyone strolling through the marketplaces of a city or town during this same period would have heard vendors singing the praises of their merchandise. Composers often found inspiration in these tuneful solicitations, the forerunners of our modern advertising jingles. An anonymous motet from the thirteenth-century Montpellier Codex incorporates a tenor part calling out “Fresh strawberries! Wild blackberries!” Around this same time, poet Guillaume de Villeneuve compiled a collection of Parisian cries, and in the fourteenth century Florentine composer Francesco Landini wrote a work that drew upon these same humble themes. In perhaps the most famous example of this legitimizing process, Clément Janequin incorporated dozens of these melodies into his four-part vocal work “Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris.” But how many street songs found their way into the classical music canon without leaving any trace of their lineage? We know that Handel once admitted that he borrowed musical ideas from street singers, and many other composers must have done the same, even if only unconsciously.

然而，这些风格化的改编让我们很少意识到这种音乐创作源泉的活力和普遍性，它一直延续到近代。直到1938年，联邦作家计划才记录了纽约市数千名街头小贩中发现的各种即兴市场歌曲，并呼吁人们关注“哈莱姆人行道”上尤为丰富的音景。据研究员特里·罗斯称，这个街区的音乐“比城市东区或西区的音乐更加轻快，因为无忧无虑的街头小贩们用有趣的广告歌和切分音的节奏兜售他们的商品。”然而，这份文件只提供了几句歌词，并没有实际的录音。几十年来，我一直试图收集这种现已消失的商业模式的现存实地录音，但——唉！——却发现寥寥无几。唱歌的小贩一直兴盛到20世纪中叶，然而关于这种做法的精确信息几乎已经为当今的学者所遗忘。而对于我们来说，五百年前的街头叫卖声更是模糊不清，它曾经是日常生活音乐结构中不可或缺的一部分，但即使是最专注的研究者也永远听不到它的声音^。5

Yet these stylized adaptations give us little idea of the vitality or pervasiveness of this source of music-making, which survived until very recent times. As late as 1938, the Federal Writers’ Project documented a wide array of improvised market songs found among the several thousand street vendors of New York City, and called attention to an especially rich soundscape on the “sidewalks of Harlem.” This neighborhood featured, according to researcher Terry Roth, “sprightlier music than is heard on the East or West side of the city, for carefree street vendors employ amusing jingles and syncopated rhythms in offering their wares.” Yet this document provides only a few lyrics, and no actual recordings were made. Over a period of decades, I have tried to collect the surviving field recordings of this now extinct mode of commerce, but—alas!—have found very few examples. Singing vendors flourished until the middle decades of the twentieth century, and yet precise information about this practice is all but lost to scholars of the current day. And how much more obscure to us are the street cries of five hundred years ago, once an essential part of the musical fabric of day-to-day life, but silenced forever even for the most dedicated researcher.⁵

同样，我们对欧洲各地民政当局雇佣的乐师所演奏的旋律也几乎知之甚少。大量文献记载，他们雇佣号手或其他号角演奏者在中央塔楼“鸣响警戒”，显然他们使用了一系列信号进行通告。他们的音乐可以通报城门的开启或关闭、敌人的逼近、火灾的危险、时间的流逝，甚至可能通报许多其他我们如今未知的事件和突发事件。在某些情况下，这些信号几乎不配被称为表演——例如，我们听到一些未经音乐训练的卫兵使用号角，这些号角只不过是一种制造噪音的原始乐器，因其响度而非艺术性而备受推崇——然而在其他情况下，技艺精湛的乐器演奏家则承担了这些职责。我们很想知道他们究竟是如何发挥创造力来创作这些在遥远年代为市民所熟知的旋律的，但这对我们来说永远只能是一个猜测。

By the same token, we know almost as little about the melodies of the musicians hired by civil authorities throughout Europe. Numerous documents tell us that trumpeters or other horn players were hired to “sound the watch” from central towers, and apparently they used a range of signals for their announcements. Their music gave notice to the opening or closing of city gates, the approach of an enemy, danger from a fire, or just the passing hours, and perhaps many other incidents and contingencies now unknown to us. In some instances, these signals must have hardly deserved the title of a performance—we hear, for example, of guards untrained in music using horns that were little more than noisemakers, a kind of primitive vuvuzela prized for loudness rather than artistry—yet in other instances, highly skilled instrumentalists took on these responsibilities. We are curious to know exactly how they exercised their creativity in crafting these melodies, so familiar to the citizens of those distant days, but this will forever remain a matter of conjecture for us.

例如，约翰·布兰克（John Blanke）的有趣案例，他是第一批在英国找到工作的非洲人之一。布兰克曾担任16 世纪初，布兰克担任亨利七世国王的号手。我们不知道他在官方身份下（或者在非正式场合）演奏什么样的音乐，但可以肯定他的服务非常珍贵。亨利八世国王登基后，布兰克获得了加薪的奖励，后来的一份文件表明，这位号手收到了君主赠送的丰厚结婚礼物。我们听说过这一时期欧洲还有其他黑人号手和鼓手，但幸存的文件提供的细节很少。然而，约翰·布兰克的情况尤其令人沮丧——尽管他在文艺复兴晚期最著名的统治者的宫廷中事业有成，但他的歌曲和人生故事却一片空白。

Consider, for example, the intriguing case of John Blanke, one of the first Africans to find employment in England. Blanke served as trumpeter for King Henry VII in the early 1500s. We have no idea what kind of music he played in his official capacity (or in unofficial settings, for that matter), but can safely assume that his services were highly prized. When King Henry VIII came to the throne, Blanke was rewarded with a wage increase, and a later document indicates that the trumpeter received a lavish wedding gift from the monarch. We hear of other black trumpeters and drummers in Europe during this period, but the surviving documents offer few details. Yet the case of John Blanke is especially frustrating—even though he thrived in the court of the most famous ruler of the late Renaissance, his songs and life story are literally a blank.

同样充满不确定性的还有日常生活中最令人敬畏的音乐——无处不在的钟声。一千年来，钟声一直是欧洲人生活中最持久的伴奏。但我们对钟声的了解有多少呢？即使是经常翻译成钟的拉丁词signum，更准确地说，是指信号或符号。我们听说过有人被 signum 召唤去祈祷或工作，但我们能假设这种召唤来自钟声吗？一些评论员似乎确信，任何从塔楼发出的信号都一定是铃声（用当代的说法）。是的，即使在今天，我们仍然用这样的术语来规范我们的生活。但正如我们刚才看到的，音乐家们经常在我们现在称之为钟楼的地方用小号和其他乐器演奏。所以我们只能猜测在那些最高的表演场所里发生了什么，它们离天堂只有一步之遥。

Just as much uncertainty surrounds that most awe-inspiring music of day-to-day life, the ever-present sound of bells. This was the most persistent soundtrack of European life for a thousand years. But how well do we really understand the bells? Even the Latin word frequently translated as bell, signum, more precisely refers to a signal or sign. We hear of people called to prayer or work by a signum, but can we assume this summons came from a bell? Some commentators seem convinced that any signal delivered from a tower must have been a ringtone (to use the contemporary parlance). Yes, we still regulate our lives even today with such terminology. But as we have just seen, musicians often performed on trumpets and other instruments from a place we would now describe as a belfry. So we can merely guess at what was happening in those loftiest of performance spaces, just a step below heaven itself.

即便如此，我们也无法否认，在这段漫长的欧洲历史时期，钟声所享有的崇高声望。渴望拥有比邻近社区更大的钟声，促使人们在金属铸造技术上投入了大量的时间和精力，而当时创新很少被放在优先位置。随着钟琴（一种由键盘演奏的调音钟，于1510年首次传入佛兰德斯）的发展，钟楼中回荡着更加精致的旋律，敲钟人的表达范围和艺术抱负也都向前迈进了一步。在公元前1000年，欧洲每天平均敲响多少口钟？文艺复兴？历史学家朱尔斯·米什莱曾夸口，圣女贞德曾因敲响鲁昂五百口钟而备受尊敬——这说法令人难以置信。然而，更大的真理却是不容置疑的：如果你生活在那个时代，你很少会在钟声范围之外，或者长时间听不到它响亮的钟声。

Even so, we cannot doubt the enormous prestige attached to bells during this long period of European history. The desire to have bigger bells than neighboring communities prompted tremendous investments of time and energy in metal-casting technology at a time when innovation was rarely a high priority. With the development of the carillon, a set of tuned bells played by a kind of keyboard first introduced in Flanders in 1510, more elaborate melodies resounded from the towers, and both the range of expression and the artistic ambitions of the bell ringers took another leap forward. How many bells rang in Europe on a typical day during the Renaissance? The historian Jules Michelet once boasted that Joan of Arc had been honored with the ringing of the five hundred bells of Rouen—a claim that is hard to believe. Yet the larger truth is indisputable: if you lived at that time, you were seldom out of range of a bell or went long without hearing its resounding call.

但想象钟声远比理解它们所引发的复杂情感容易得多——恐惧、厌恶、崇敬、迷信和公民自豪感交织在一起，令人毛骨悚然。钟声带来严苛的纪律，迫使你从沉睡中醒来，召唤你去工作或祈祷，处处要求服从。事实上，在音乐作为政治权威和社会控制象征的悠久历史中，没有任何一种乐器比不起眼的钟声占据着更显著的地位，甚至连鼓或喇叭都不如。然而，奇怪的是，钟声在大多数音乐史书中几乎不值一提。14世纪的记录表明，不仅牧师和市议会，就连企业也依赖钟声来维持民众的秩序。 1355年，法国北部的利斯河畔艾尔镇（Aire-sur-la-Lys）获准建造一座钟楼，用于管理纺织工人的出入。同一时期，亚眠和根特也设立了类似的钟楼。就连老板们也发现自己成了警钟的奴隶，市政当局会对迟到响应钟声的议员和市政委员处以罚款。钟声日益成为工人纠纷中的争议焦点，结果也各不相同。在科米讷（Commines），任何未经授权擅自夺取钟楼召集民众集会的人，将被处以60巴黎镑的巨额罚款；如果钟楼被用来号召反抗国王，则将被处以死刑。但在1367年的塞鲁安，工人们设法获得了“永远让工人的钟声安静下来”的承诺；而在1349年的根特，市政官们通过允许织工自行选择工作时间，而不是用钟声来规范生活，解决了一次停工事件。在这类冲突中，我们最清晰地看到了音乐与权力之间的关系，这种联系在许多其他语境中往往被隐藏（尽管是隐含的）。即使在今天，我们仍然会谈论某人“被钟声拯救”——这充分表明了这些调节声音所拥有的近乎神奇的力量^。6

But it is far easier to imagine the sounds of bells than to comprehend the mixed emotions they must have elicited—a strange combination of fear, loathing, reverence, superstition, and civic pride. The bells imposed a harsh discipline, forcing you to rise from your slumbers, summoning you to work or prayer, demanding obedience at every turn. In fact, no other instrument has figured more prominently in the long history of musical sounds as repositories of political authority and social control than the humble bell, not even the drum or trumpet. Yet, strange to say, bells hardly warrant even a passing mention in most music history books. Records from the fourteenth century show that not only priests and city councils, but also businesses relied on bells to impose order on the populace. The community of Aire-sur-la-Lys in northern France gained permission in 1355 to build a belfry to regulate the comings and goings of textile workers, and similar applications of bells existed in Amiens and Ghent during this period. Even the bosses now found themselves in servitude to the tocsin, with cities imposing fines on councilors and aldermen who were late in responding to the call of the bell. Bells increasingly emerged as contentious points in worker disputes, with varying results. In Commines, a sizable penalty of sixty Parisian pounds was imposed on any unauthorized person who seized the bell to summon a popular assembly, and execution was mandated if the bell were used to call for rebellion against the king. But at Thérouanne in 1367, workers managed to extract a promise to silence “forever the workers’ bell,” and in Ghent in 1349 the aldermen resolved a work stoppage by allowing weavers to choose their own work hours instead of regulating their lives by the bell. In confrontations of this sort we see in the clearest form the relationship between musical sounds and power, a connection often hidden (albeit implicit) in so many other contexts. Even today we talk of someone getting “saved by the bell”—a revealing acknowledgment of the quasi-magical power possessed by these regulating sounds.⁶

在这种紧张的环境下，钟楼的控制权是令人垂涎的权威象征，争夺钟楼本身似乎常常引发战争。夺取一座城市的钟是令人羞辱的，而战争的胜利者会自豪地展示这些钟，将其视为军事胜利的终极标志。1303年，佛罗伦萨攻占了雄伟的蒙塔莱要塞，这座建筑唯一幸免于难的部分就是钟楼本身，它后来被安放在波德斯塔宫的钟楼中，作为征服的象征。在基督教和穆斯林势力争夺伊比利亚半岛控制权的战争中，钟楼成为了对立宗教习俗的有力象征——宣礼员的祈祷声与钟楼的钟声形成鲜明对比，成为更大冲突的音乐象征。基督教的叙事描述了圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉的钟楼如何被用作科尔多瓦大清真寺的照明灯。两个多世纪后，这种所谓的侮辱仍然被视为一种公共耻辱，以至于在1236年科尔多瓦被攻占后，卡斯蒂利亚国王斐迪南三世下令将这些灯运回国内。五百年后，这些关于钟声的冲突仍然激起人们强烈的情绪。历史学家阿兰·科尔宾在其独具特色的研究《乡村钟声》中，多次记录了法国大革命期间价值观冲突聚焦于钟声事件的情形。即使在那个晚期，钟声不仅定义了公民身份、宗教习俗和日常生活的里程碑，还代表着战斗人员为之战斗甚至献身的核心信念^。7

In this charged environment, control of a belfry was a coveted symbol of authority, and it often seemed as if battles were fought over the bells themselves. The abduction of a city’s bells was humiliating, and victors in battle proudly displayed these as the ultimate sign of military triumph. When Florence defeated the imposing fortress at Montale in 1303, the only part of the edifice spared from destruction was the bell, which was later mounted in the campanile of the Palazzo of the Podestà as a symbol of conquest. In the battles between Christian and Muslim forces over control of the Iberian Peninsula, bells served as powerful emblems of opposed religious practices—the contrast between the muezzin’s call to prayer and the tolling from the belfry standing out as a musical representation of the larger conflict. Christian narratives describe how the bells of Santiago de Compostela were used as lamps for the Great Mosque of Córdoba. More than two centuries later, the supposed affront was still viewed as a public disgrace, so much so that after Córdoba was captured in 1236, the lamps were returned home by order of Ferdinand III of Castile. These ringtone conflicts were still stirring up powerful feelings half a millennium later. In his unique study Village Bells, historian Alain Corbin recounts numerous occasions when the clash of values surrounding the French Revolution focused on incidents involving bells. Even at this late juncture, the bells not only defined civic identity, religious practice, and the milestones of daily life, but could represent the very core beliefs for which combatants might fight and die.⁷

在此期间，钟常常被赋予个人身份，并被赋予超自然力量。历史学家约翰·胡伊津加（Johan Huizinga）讲述了被称为“大杰奎琳”（Big Jacqueline）和“罗兰钟”（Bell Roland）的钟，在许多其他情况下，钟上还刻有圣徒或圣母玛利亚的名字。这些准宗教偶像常常与奇迹和迷信联系在一起：或许最危险、最持久的信仰是，人们相信敲响教堂的钟声可以阻止冰雹、飓风、雷暴和其他暴风雨。钟声。这种普遍存在的观念困扰着敲钟人的生活，他们被迫在最猛烈的雷暴天气中登上社区的最高点。直到18世纪，法国科学院仍认为有必要对这种做法提出警告，并颁布了各种法令予以禁止。然而，即使到了19世纪，敲钟人仍然以这种方式冒着生命危险。直到1899年，英格兰西南部海滨度假胜地德文郡道利什教区的一位敲钟人还在雷雨天拼命敲钟，以“战胜闪电之灵” ^。8

During the intervening period, bells were often assigned personal identities and attributed with supernatural powers. Historian Johan Huizinga tells of bells called Big Jacqueline and Bell Roland, and in many other instances they were inscribed with the names of saints or the Virgin Mary. Miracles and superstitions were often associated with these quasi-religious icons: perhaps the most dangerous and persistent was the belief that hail, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and other tempests could be halted by ringing church bells. This widely held notion bedeviled the life of a bell ringer, who was forced to ascend to the highest point in the community in the midst of the fiercest lightning storms. As late as the eighteenth century, the French Academy of Sciences felt it necessary to warn against the practice, and various legal decrees were implemented to prohibit it. Yet the bell ringers continued to risk their lives in this manner even into the nineteenth century. As late as 1899, a bell ringer of the Dawlish parish in Devon, a seaside resort in southwestern England, worked furiously during a thunderstorm in order to “overcome the Spirit of Lightning.”⁸

面对这些记录不全、如今已失传的音乐实践——从歌妓到勇敢的钟声人——我们几乎无法理解这些漫长岁月中，典型的乡村和城市居民丰富的听觉生活，哪怕只是冰山一角。我们可以在史书中写满巨星作曲家受邀为教皇或国王演奏的故事，但这并不能真正展现主宰欧洲人生活长达数代的宏伟音景。而我们的音乐美学理论也难以公正地展现它们与暴力、性、魔法、权力和金钱之间密不可分的联系。

In the face of this litany of poorly documented and now lost musical practices—from singing prostitutes to daredevil bell-tollers—we can hardly hope to comprehend more than the smallest part of the rich aural lives of typical village and city dwellers during these long centuries. We can stuff our history books full of stories of superstar composers invited to play for a pope or king, but this provides no true account of the imposing soundscapes that dominated European life for many generations. And our aesthetic theories of music hardly do justice to their inextricable connections to violence, sex, magic, power, and money.

在这方面，欧洲音乐学会了如何模仿欧洲社会。对等级制度的崇敬弥漫于两者之间，极少数精英获得了大部分关注，而大众的活动则几乎消失得无影无踪。这一阶段的音乐比以往任何时候都更加阶层化。同样，它的参与性也大大降低。在世界其他地方——例如非洲，或当时正经历着首次殖民尝试的新大陆——传统的社群仍然倾向于将每个人都视为共享音乐体验的贡献者。但欧洲文化却以不同的模式构建了其音乐的上层建筑。这种阶层化的方式能够创造出令人惊叹的杰作：宏大的交响曲、错综复杂的赋格曲、精雕细琢的歌剧以及其他璀璨的声音盛宴。但要做到这一点，绝大多数人必须接受获取音乐的极端限制。他们既不是创作者，也不是合作者，而是听众。他们人们期望尊敬精英音乐家，他们现在享有前所未有的自由和自我主义，并承担这些行为不端的明星的所有费用。

In this regard, European music learned how to imitate European society. A reverence for hierarchy permeated both, with a tiny number of elites gaining most of the attention, while the activity of the great masses disappeared from view with hardly a trace. Music at this stage became more stratified than ever before. By the same token, it was far less participative. In other parts of the globe—for example, in Africa, or throughout the New World, then experiencing the first attempts at colonization—traditional communities still tended to treat everyone as a contributor to shared musical experiences. But European culture had erected its musical superstructures on a different model. This stratified approach would create amazing masterpieces: grand symphonies, intricate fugues, elaborate operas, and other luminous spectacles of sound. But for this to happen, the vast majority of the population had to accept extreme constraints on how they accessed music. They were neither creators nor collaborators, but rather, an audience. They were expected to revere elite musicians, who now exercised a degree of freedom and egotism hitherto unknown, and cover all the costs for these badly behaving stars.

然而，即便在这种卑微的伪装下，观众也能产生巨大的影响力，最终坚持认为这种等级森严的文化应该充当一种流行文化。这便是我们至今仍在信奉的模式，它如此熟悉，以至于我们几乎察觉不到其中自相矛盾的张力和矛盾。但它依然是一个悖论。观众经常被操纵，有时被鄙视和嘲笑，并且不可避免地被排除在创作之外。然而，观众仍然在幕后操纵着大部分的情节——即使是傲慢的超级明星也必须讨好它，否则就要承担后果。

Yet even in this humble guise, the audience would exert tremendous impact, eventually insisting that this intensely hierarchical culture act as a popular culture. That’s the formula we still embrace today, and it’s so familiar that we hardly recognize its paradoxical tensions and contradictions. But a paradox it remains. The audience is often manipulated, sometimes despised and ridiculed, and invariably excluded from creative input. Yet it still pulls most of the strings—and even haughty superstars must court its favor, or face the consequences.

15

15

音乐产业的起源

The Origins of the Music Business

文化史上的大多数重大转折点都似是而非。后视镜中出现的突如其来的断裂，从旧到新的飞跃，如果没有一系列细小的转变和改变，几乎不可能发生。编年史家的作用是将这些事件的轨迹鲜活地呈现出来，揭示看似自发的新事物背后渐进的、有机的过程。换句话说，历史没有开关。即使是突如其来的顿悟，也需要我们长时间的警醒，为即将到来的黎明做好准备。

Most of the grand turning points in cultural history are illusory. What appears in the rearview mirror as a sudden disjunction, a leap from the old to the new, could hardly have happened without a long series of smaller shifts and alterations making it possible. The role of the chronicler is to bring this trail of events to life, revealing the gradual, organic processes behind the apparently spontaneous arising of the new. Put differently, there are no on/off switches in history. Even the sudden moments of illumination require a long vigil to prepare us for the coming dawn.

即便如此，1600年依然有着非凡之处。我毫不意外，米歇尔·福柯将这一时期作为事物秩序出现巨大裂痕的时刻，古典世界的范畴被抛诸脑后，为新的表征模式开辟了道路。福柯很少关注这一时期的表演风格——音乐不在他的视野之内——但在音乐史上，我们很难找到比1600年更重要的年份了。现存最古老的歌剧，由雅各布·佩里创作的《尤丽迪茜》，于同年10月6日在佛罗伦萨首演。埃米利奥·德·卡瓦列里的《灵魂与肉体的呈现》（Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo）常被认为是第一部清唱剧，该剧于几个月前的二月在罗马首演。牧歌在1600年也蓬勃发展，克劳迪奥·蒙特威尔第创作了许多该流派的代表作。通奏低音也在同一时期成为一种重要的音乐技巧——这看似微不足道，但人们意识到它的重要性在于，它打破了以群体为导向的复音音乐模式，转向以旋律和伴奏为基础的个性化作品。同样的转变也体现在“奏鸣曲”（sonata）一词越来越多地用于描述独奏者或小乐团演奏的器乐作品。这些转变都有不同的原因和影响，但总体趋势是强调音乐中以个性为主导的精神^。1

Even so, there is something remarkable about the year 1600. I’m hardly surprised that Michel Foucault focused on this juncture as the moment when a great rift emerged in the order of things, leaving behind the categories of the classical world and opening the way for new modes of representation. Foucault pays little attention to performance styles from this period—music was outside of his purview—but we could hardly find a more important date in music history than 1600. The oldest surviving opera, Euridice by Jacopo Peri, had its premiere in Florence on October 6 of that year. Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo, often considered the first oratorio, made its debut in Rome a few months earlier, in February. The madrigal was also flourishing in 1600, with Claudio Monteverdi working on many of the defining masterpieces of that genre. The basso continuo emerged as an important musical technique around this same time—seemingly a small matter, until one realizes its significance in tilting the balance away from group-oriented polyphony and toward individualistic works built on melody and accompaniment. This same shift could be seen in the increasing use of the term sonata to describe instrumental works for a soloist or small group of musicians. Each of these shifts had different causes and ramifications, but the overall trend was an accentuation of the personality-driven ethos in music.¹

并非所有人都对这些变化充满热情。就在那意义重大的一年，音乐理论家乔瓦尼·阿图西承认，尽管“在我这个年纪，看到新的作曲方法让我欣喜若狂”，但他也对那些似乎决心“腐蚀、破坏和毁掉过去由众多理论家和最优秀的音乐家传承下来的优良传统规则”的新来者感到沮丧。这句话现在应该已经耳熟能详：音乐创新带来的敌意和抵制。阿图西瞄准了他那个时代最伟大的作曲家克劳迪奥·蒙特威尔第，并引发了音乐史上最激烈的争议之一。然而，几年后，我们也在这里遇到了本书中反复记录的同样的合法化过程。1633年，蒙特威尔第甚至声称，这位充满敌意的批评者在他去世前就已经接受了新的现代声音。 “他（阿图西）不仅不再推翻我的决定——转而赞扬我——还开始喜欢我、钦佩我。” 音乐革命几乎总是以这样的方式结束：纷争消弭，昔日斗士之间的联系得到强调。每个世纪的细节各不相同，但动机几乎总是相同的：文化战争中的失败者决定加入胜利者一方^。2

Not everyone greeted these changes with enthusiasm. In that same momentous year, music theorist Giovanni Artusi admitted that though “it pleases me, at my age, to see a new method of composing,” he was dismayed by newcomers who seemed determined to “corrupt, spoil and ruin the good traditional rules handed down in former times by so many theorists and most excellent musicians.” This refrain should be familiar by now: the hostility and resistance brought out by musical innovation. Artusi had the greatest composer of his day, Claudio Monteverdi, in his crosshairs, and now stirred up one of the most heated controversies in the history of music. Yet here we also encounter, a few years later, the same process of legitimization documented again and again in this book. In 1633, Monteverdi went so far as to claim that his hostile critic had embraced the new modern sounds before his death. “Not only did he [Artusi] stop overruling me—turning his pen in my praise—but he began to like and admire me.” This is the way musical revolutions almost always end: the acrimony is washed away, and connections between former combatants are emphasized. The details differ from century to century, but the motivation is almost always the same: the loser in a culture war decides to join the winning side.²

这是一个新时代的曙光。过去，音乐家们被要求侍奉一种更高的力量——这并不总是指上帝。更多的时候，是世俗的权贵，以及他们有时墨守成规的机构，发号施令。他们在蒙特威尔第时代甚至之后仍然致力于这样做，但他们对音乐事务的控制力正在减弱，这一点越来越明显。在十七世纪初，市场上为自由职业音乐家提供的谋生选择数量迅速增加。诚然，在此之前，许多音乐家都是通过逐笔交易赚钱的——甚至毕达哥拉斯和他的追随者在西方音乐首次将其实践法典化时也雇佣他们提供服务——但他们从未面临过如此丰富的盈利机会。在文艺复兴末期，我们遇到了真正的音乐企业。（事实上，其中一个至今仍在运营：Zildjian，一家领先的钹和鼓配件供应商，总部位于马萨诸塞州，由仍在经营它的家族于 1623 年在伊斯坦布尔创立。）音乐出版在 17 世纪初获得了发展动力，并开创了娱乐业至今仍在遵循的做法。歌剧最初是富人的特权盛宴，后来逐渐演变为面向大众的商业娱乐。随着欧洲市场经济的发展，从公开演出到私人教学，其他收入来源也随之扩大。

It was the dawn of a new age. In the past, the musicians had been asked to serve a higher power—which didn’t always mean God. More often earthly potentates, and their sometimes hidebound institutions, called the shots. They still aimed to do so in the age of Monteverdi, and even after, but their weakening control over musical matters was increasingly apparent. The number of options in the marketplace for musicians to earn a living as freelancers expanded rapidly in the early decades of the seventeenth century. True, many musicians had made money on a transaction-by-transaction basis before this—even Pythagoras and his followers hired out their services, back when Western music was first codifying its practices—but never had they faced such a rich array of profitable ventures. At the close of the Renaissance we encounter true music businesses. (In fact, one of them is still operating today: Zildjian, a leading supplier of cymbals and drum accessories, with its headquarters in Massachusetts, was founded in Istanbul in 1623 by the family that still runs it.) Music publishing gained traction in the early 1600s and set practices in motion that the entertainment industry still follows today. Opera emerged as a privileged spectacle for the wealthy, then gradually turned into commercial entertainment for the general public. Other income streams, from concertizing in public to teaching in private, expanded with the growth in the market economies of Europe.

尽管机会众多，但很少有顶尖作曲家仅靠自由职业谋生。精英音乐家仍然追求在教会或宫廷获得正式职位所带来的保障和声望。但几乎所有巴洛克时期（后来被称为巴洛克时期）的重要人物都兼任企业家，在市场上寻找诱人的商业机会。顺便提一下，评论家最初将“巴洛克”一词用作一种侮辱，嘲笑这种美学理念的繁琐复杂和过度的个人主义，并将其与文艺复兴时期的整体优雅进行对比。与本文讨论的许多音乐家一样，这个标签后来也合法化，并成为一个赞美之词。但新的秩序中存在着某种令人不安和古怪的东西，一切都仍在不断变化，时代的明星们在机遇之间徘徊。以一种奇特而又恰如其分的方式，十七世纪音乐中新发现的自由和灵活性与作曲家自身相得益彰。他们的职业生涯与那个时代的音乐一样巴洛克风格。我们必须对蒙特威尔第感到困惑，他如此擅长将“唤起的情色”（用音乐学家加里·汤姆林森的话来说）注入他著名的情歌中，却担任了一名天主教神父。此时，这位作曲家已经结婚并育有三个孩子。或者以让-巴蒂斯特·吕利更不寻常的履历为例，他不仅创作芭蕾舞曲，还会随着音乐跳舞——路易十四是他的舞伴！——在他职业生涯的不同阶段，他弹过吉他，当过街头艺人（扮成丑角），与剧作家莫里哀合作，发明了法国序曲，帮助在法国建立歌剧，尝试过从响板到风笛等非常规和“异国情调”的乐器，当然，像他所有的同龄人一样，他也为天主教宗教仪式创作音乐。以我们目前对流派专业化的思维模式，我们很难想象职业能够如此轻松地从一种习语转换到另一种习语，但在那个重新定义和过度的时代，这越来越成为常态^。3

Despite these opportunities, few of the leading composers supported themselves solely by freelancing. Elite musicians still sought the security and prestige of an official appointment in a church or court. But almost all the major figures from the Baroque period, as this era came to be known, doubled as entrepreneurs, seeking out attractive commercial engagements in the marketplace. It’s worth noting, in passing, that critics initially applied the term baroque as an insult, deriding the fussy intricacy and extravagant individualism of the aesthetic vision and contrasting it with the holistic elegance of the Renaissance. This label, too, like many of the musicians under discussion here, was later legitimized, and became a term of praise. But there is something unsettling and eccentric about the new order of things, with everything still in flux and the stars of the era fluttering from opportunity to opportunity. In an odd yet fitting way, the newfound freedom and flexibility in seventeenth-century music is matched by composers themselves in their career paths, which were just as baroque as the music of the era. We must puzzle over Monteverdi, so skilled at imparting an “aroused eroticism” (in the words of musicologist Gary Tomlinson) to his famous songs of love, taking orders as a Catholic priest. By this time, the composer had already been married and had fathered three children. Or take the even more unusual résumé of Jean-Baptiste Lully, who not only composed ballet music but danced to it—with Louis XIV as a dancing partner!—and at various points in his career played guitar, performed as a street entertainer (dressed as a harlequin), collaborated with the playwright Molière, invented the French overture, helped establish opera in France, experimented with unconventional and ‘exotic’ instruments, from castanets to bagpipes, and, of course, like all his peers, wrote music for Catholic religious services. With our current mindset of genre specialization, we can hardly imagine careers that move so effortlessly from idiom to idiom, but such was increasingly the norm in that age of redefinition and excess.³

这些受人尊敬的人物，看似他们那个时代权威的“建制派”作曲家，其实远比我们从他们所属的机构关系中所能猜测的更加敏感和独立。音乐学家理查德·塔鲁斯金认为，蒙特威尔第现存的信件是西方古典音乐中“艺术异化”最早的记录，并特别指出“一封令人毛骨悚然的讽刺回信……这是十八世纪前作曲家最著名的回信”。在信中，作曲家一页又一页地抨击他的曼图亚赞助人，谴责他们缺乏尊重和拖欠报酬，吹嘘他的名声、他在威尼斯的高薪和自由职业收入，以及现在他能接触到的更优秀的音乐家等等。最后，他声称，遭受这种谩骂的贡萨加家族应该给他一些地产，让他可以传给他的孩子们，因为这将为他们带来“永恒的荣誉” ^。4

These revered figures, who seem like the definitive ‘establishment’ composers of their day, were far more prickly and independent than we might guess from their institutional affiliations. Musicologist Richard Taruskin has suggested that Monteverdi’s surviving letters are the earliest examples on record “of artistic alienation” in Western classical music, and calls particular attention to “a hair-raisingly sarcastic reply… the most famous letter by a composer before the eighteenth century.” Here the composer goes on for page after page lambasting his Mantuan patrons, denouncing their lack of respect and tardy payments, bragging about his renown, his superior salary and freelance income in Venice, the better musicians now available to him, etc. He ends by asserting that the Gonzaga family, the target of this abuse, should give him some landed property that he could pass on to his children, because it would accrue to their “everlasting honor.”⁴

就吕利而言，冲突的原因各不相同，争议来自多个方面，例如，一首关于他的女赞助人的丑闻诗，以及与各种年轻男子的恋情（同时生育了十个孩子）。吕利甚至在勾引了正在宫廷接受训练的年轻侍从布鲁内特后，失去了国王的宠爱。当时吕利五十三岁，凭借其名望和人脉关系，他得以逃脱起诉。而布鲁内特则被送往修道院接受粗暴的改造。对于吕利和蒙特威尔第，以及古典音乐殿堂中的许多其他人，我们需要透过他们几乎总是充满紧张关系、并为其传记披上一层令人误解的体面光环的机构关系来理解他们曾多么频繁地与时代的规范和期望抗争。历史将他们描绘成完美的圈内人，但他们日常生活的细节却讲述了一个截然不同的故事。

In the case of Lully, the causes of conflict were different, and controversies stemmed from many sources—for example, a scandalous poem about his patroness, and various love affairs with young men (concurrent with a marriage that produced ten children). Lully even lost the favor of the king after the composer seduced a young page, Brunet, who was training for service in the royal court. Lully was fifty-three years old at the time, and he was able to escape prosecution because of his renown and connections. Brunet, for his part, was sent off to a monastery for roughshod rehabilitation. In the cases of Lully and Monteverdi, as for so many others in the pantheon of classical music, we need to look past their institutional affiliations, which are almost always fraught with tension and provide a misleading aura of respectability to their biographies, to grasp how often they battled with the norms and expectations of their times. History paints them as the consummate insiders, but the details of their day-to-day lives tell a different story.

在上述蒙特威尔第的信中，这位作曲家吹嘘自己除了在威尼斯圣马可大教堂担任无伴奏合唱大师的薪水外，还能通过副业赚钱。当时，威尼斯是自由音乐家的理想之地。这座城市是世界上最具活力的音乐出版中心，也是歌剧从赞助人自我陶醉的表演演变为真正大众娱乐的孵化器。这座港口城市再次成为通往其他文化的门户，并最终成为音乐创新的中心，就像古希腊的莱斯博斯岛或二十世纪美国的新奥尔良一样。尽管拥有这些优势，蒙特威尔第的收入中只有约三分之一来自自由职业。作曲家的知识产权当时还很原始，大多局限于最简单的雇佣劳动，没有我们如今所熟悉的剩余收入或版税收入。如果作曲家想通过出版真正实现商业化，他们需要自己创办出版商。令人惊讶的是，很多作曲家都迈出了这一步，这通常是他们与有影响力的赞助人建立关系的一部分。

In the Monteverdi letter mentioned above, the composer brags about his ability to earn money from sideline activities, in addition to his salary as maestro di cappella at the Basilica San Marco in Venice. Venice was the perfect place for a freelance musician at this time. The city stood out as the most vibrant center of music publishing in the world, and was the incubator where opera evolved from a patron’s self-indulgent spectacle into true popular entertainment. Here again, a port city that served as a gateway to other cultures emerges as a center of musical innovation, much as Lesbos did in ancient Greece, or New Orleans in twentieth-century America. Despite these advantages, Monteverdi could only count on freelancing for around one-third of his income. Intellectual property rights for composers were primitive, mostly limited to the simplest work-for-hire terms without any of the residual or royalty income we are familiar with nowadays. If composers wanted to make a real business out of publishing, they needed to set up as publishers themselves. And a surprising number of them took this step, typically as part of their relationship with a powerful patron.

伊丽莎白女王授予威廉·伯德和托马斯·塔利斯一项在英国印刷和出版音乐的专利，有效期为21年。这项权利也延伸至其他作曲家创作作品时使用的空白五线谱纸——甚至在写下第一个音符之前，伯德和塔利斯就已获得分成。欧洲其他地区也出现了类似的安排，并影响了音乐的传播。音乐领域已有两个多世纪的历史。1521 年，巴托洛梅奥·特龙博奇诺从威尼斯参议院获得了为期 15 年的独家音乐印刷特权，尽管他可能从未利用过这项特权——事实上，这项恩惠可能更多的是作为一种版权，而不是进入出版业的实际动机。但 1523 年授予管风琴家马可·安东尼奥·卡瓦佐尼的一项专利显然旨在让他垄断一项新技术，这显然是一种创新的音乐谱法；我们只能猜测其范围，因为持有者出版的作品都采用了传统的符号。半个世纪后，作曲家奥兰多·迪·拉索在法国获得了涵盖其作品的印刷权，后来又在现今的德国向神圣罗马帝国皇帝鲁道夫二世寻求类似的权利。吕利当时的地位几乎达到了文化沙皇的水平，甚至控制了法国所有的歌剧演出——这项特权让他留下了80万里弗的遗产，比当时许多位高权重的政府部长毕生积累的财富还要多。这种“付费演出”的特权一直延续到18世纪。直到1724年，作曲家约瑟夫·博丹·德·布瓦莫蒂埃才获得了皇家音乐刻版许可，从而将一个二流的才华变成了巨额财富。据称，他用吹嘘自己赚了多少钱来回应人们对他平庸音乐的批评。

Queen Elizabeth granted William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent on the printing and publishing of music in England for a period of twenty-one years. This right extended to blank music staff paper other composers used to write their works—even before a single note was written, Byrd and Tallis got their cut. Similar arrangements took place elsewhere in Europe and influenced the dissemination of music for more than two centuries. In 1521, Bartolomeo Tromboncino received a fifteen-year exclusive privilege from the Venetian Senate for printing music, although he may have never taken advantage of it—indeed, this favor may have been intended more as a copyright than an actual incentive to enter the publishing business. But a patent awarded to organist Marco Antonio Cavazzoni in 1523 clearly aimed to provide him with a monopoly over a new technology, apparently an innovative form of music tablature; we can merely guess at its scope, because the only works published by the holder employ conventional notation. Half a century later, composer Orlando di Lasso secured a printing privilege covering his works in France, and later sought similar rights in present-day Germany from Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor. Lully was elevated almost to the level of a cultural czar around this time, and even controlled all opera performances in France—a perk that allowed him to leave behind an estate of 800,000 livres, more than what many powerful government ministers of the time accumulated during entire careers. These pay-for-play privileges continued into the eighteenth century. As late as 1724, composer Joseph Bodin de Boismortier received a royal license on music engraving, and thus turned a second-class talent into substantial wealth. He allegedly responded to criticisms of his undistinguished music with boasts about how much money he was earning.

乍一看，这似乎是一个奇妙的转折：音乐家们掌握了各自领域的最新技术，并可以利用它们来改进艺术形式。可悲的是，现实却大相径庭。音乐家们往往像旧时的赞助人一样霸道，或者被嫉妒和怨恨所驱使。（你感到惊讶吗？）他们经常依靠专利和特权来阻碍他人音乐的传播。1596年，伯德和塔利斯最初获得的专利到期，随之而来的是一段短暂的创作热潮，他们的竞争对手终于被允许出版他们的作品——音乐学家格雷厄姆·弗里曼认为，“这使得1597年成为英国音乐出版史上的巅峰”。换句话说，当音乐家们失去控制权时，音乐蓬勃发展。专利持有者也可能利用他们的权力控制着在英国流传的音乐种类。例如，我注意到在最初的专利期间，琵琶音乐的出版并不多见，我不禁怀疑伯德对这种乐器缺乏兴趣是否导致了这种忽视。我们发现其他一些例子表明，这些特权反而限制了音乐艺术的发展，而不是促进了音乐艺术的发展，并留下了一个令人不快的想法（至少对我来说是这样），那就是音乐家本身可能并非其领域内新技术的最佳守护者^。5

At first glance, this might seem a wonderful turn of events: musicians were given control of the latest technology in their field, and could use it for the betterment of the art form. Sad to say, the reality was far different. Musicians often proved just as domineering as the patrons of old, or driven by envy and spite. (Are you surprised?) They frequently relied on their patents and privileges to hinder the dissemination of music by others. When the original patent granted to Byrd and Tallis expired in 1596, a brief interlude of creative ferment ensued as their rivals were finally allowed to publish their works—“making 1597 a high point in the history of English music publishing,” according to musicologist Graham Freeman. In other words, music flourished when the musicians lost control. The patent holders may also have used their authority to control the kinds of music that circulated in England. I note, for example, the absence of published lute music during the period of the initial patent, and wonder whether Byrd’s lack of interest in the instrument may have played a role in this neglect. We find other instances in which these privileges served to constrain rather than advance musical arts, and are left with the displeasing notion (to me, at least) that musicians themselves may not be the best custodians of new technologies in their field.⁵

当专利落入印刷商而非作曲家手中时，音乐生态系统似乎受益匪浅。奥塔维亚诺·佩特鲁奇利用他在威尼斯获得的音乐出版专利，通过三次压印技术推动了这项技术的发展。这项工艺需要极其细致的考量，需要将文字、五线谱和音符分步印制，但这代表了该领域的重大进步。佩特鲁奇出版了六十多卷乐谱，在将音乐转化为真正的商业模式方面所做的贡献几乎超过了他那个时代的任何人，在这个领域，企业家无需演奏乐器或创作乐谱也能获得成功。即便如此，这种飞跃也难以实现真正的大规模生产，或者像我们今天所定义的那样，难以催生出“畅销书”。一部音乐作品的典型印数只有几百册。欧洲的其他印刷商，尤其是巴黎的皮埃尔·阿塔因南特，采用了更便宜的单次压印印刷技术，更适合大批量生产。即便如此，阿塔因南特的印数可能也只有一千册左右。因此，作曲家常常不得不自掏腰包补贴作品的印刷，尽管他们对成品的知识产权有限。想想萨拉莫内·罗西于1623年在威尼斯出版的一本经文歌集上，首次发现了针对已出版音乐作品的版权警告，这既有趣又令人悲伤：它没有法律威胁，只是对任何侵犯作曲家权利的人发出了诅咒。任何胆敢未经许可转载作品的人都会被蛇咬——而且，读者被告知，这种威胁是天使授权的。鉴于这些种种限制，早期没有一位音乐家能够想象通过出版音乐来致富，甚至无法将其视为第一手资料。收入。但它确实为作曲家提供了强大的合法性来源，建立了“经典”作品的典范，并为后来历史上真正大规模消费印刷音乐奠定了基础。

The music ecosystem seemed better served when patents went to printers, not composers. Ottaviano Petrucci used his patent on music publishing in Venice to advance the technology with his application of triple impression printing. This process demanded great care, with words, staves, and notes applied in separate steps, but represented a major improvement in the field. Petrucci published more than sixty volumes of music, and did more than almost anyone of his day to transform music into a true business, a field where entrepreneurs could prosper without playing an instrument or composing a note. Even so, this leap forward hardly allowed for true mass production, or for ‘best sellers’ as we would define them today. A typical print run for a musical work was a few hundred copies. Other printers in Europe, most notably Pierre Attaingnant in Paris, adopted a cheaper printing technology, using a single impression, that was better suited for high-volume production. Still, Attaingnant’s press runs were probably only around one thousand copies. As a result, composers often had to reach into their own pockets to subsidize the printing of their works, although their intellectual property rights in the finished product were limited. How amusing, yet sadly revealing, to consider the first copyright warning on a published work of music, found attached to a collection of motets by Salamone Rossi issued in Venice in 1623: it involved no legal threats, merely a curse on anyone infringing on the composer’s rights. Anyone who dared reprint the works without permission would get bitten by a serpent—and this threat, readers were told, was authorized by angels. Given these various constraints, no musician in these early days could envision getting rich from publishing music, or even consider it a primary source of income. But it did serve as a powerful source of legitimization for a composer, established a canon of ‘classic’ works, and laid the groundwork for true mass consumption of printed music at a later stage in history.

事实上，歌剧的兴起对这一时期音乐家经济前景的提振作用远大于音乐出版业的扩张。然而，奇怪的是，作曲家并非主要受益者。歌手才是真正的明星，也是能索要最高报酬的人。女高音歌唱家朱莉娅·马索蒂引发了竞价战，1666年，她索要的报酬是她所演绎作品的作曲家的四倍多；不到十年，她的报酬已经是作曲家的六倍。歌手的成本可能占到一部歌剧制作总预算的40%以上，其余部分则互相争夺。作曲家皮埃特罗·齐亚尼向经理人马可·福斯蒂尼抱怨，歌手的报酬是他为《卡普阿的安尼巴莱》（1660年）所获报酬的十倍甚至更多，尽管这已经是他为主办方创作的第五部歌剧了。随着歌剧日益流行，剧院也日益兴建，争夺声乐人才的竞争也愈演愈烈，即使是著名的作曲家，在舞台上也不得不屈居于女主角之下。半个多世纪过去了，女高音歌唱家弗朗西斯卡·库佐尼演唱亨德尔作品的收入仍然高于亨德尔创作作品的收入。

In fact, the rise of opera did more to help the economic prospects of musicians during this period than the expansion in music publishing. Yet, strangely enough, composers weren’t the main beneficiaries. Singers were the true stars, and were also the ones who could demand the most money. Soprano Giulia Massotti incited bidding wars, and in 1666 she could demand more than four times as much money as the composers whose works she performed; before the end of the decade, she was getting paid six times as much. The cost of singers could take up more than 40 percent of the total budget for producing an opera, and the other participants fought over the rest. Composer Pietro Ziani complained to impresario Marco Faustini that singers were receiving ten times or more what he had made for Annibale in Capua (1660), even though this was his fifth opera for the promoter. As opera gained in popularity and more theaters were built, the competition to secure vocal talent only grew more intense, and even a famous composer needed to take a back seat to the diva onstage. More than half a century later, soprano Francesca Cuzzoni was still earning more for singing Handel’s music than Handel made from composing it.

其他特权巩固了首席女高音（或“第一夫人”）的地位，这些歌手现在被称为首席女高音。这些特权远远超出了私人包厢和特殊津贴，延伸到对音乐和剧本的艺术控制。明星歌手可以决定是否添加、删减、移调或编辑歌曲，在某些情况下还可以决定创造一个全新的角色。但即使这样也不足以取悦一些反复无常的表演者，他们从其他歌剧中带来自己喜欢的歌曲，坚持要将它们纳入新的制作中。“diva”一词最终被用来指代这些歌手，这揭示了她们的崇高地位：在意大利语中，这个词的意思是女神，是名副其实的女性神灵。取悦这些“天后”的挑战如此之大，以至于如今“diva”的标签有时也用在才华稍逊的人身上，甚至不唱歌的人，只要他们的要求足够离谱，他们所主张的特殊权利也越过界线。这一切都始于歌剧从观众私人观赏的表演，转变为以盈利为目的的娱乐产业。

Other perks confirmed the status of the prima donna (or “first lady”), as these singers were now called. These privileges went far beyond private boxes and special allowances, extending into artistic control over the music and libretto. A star singer could decide whether songs were added, cut, transposed, or edited, and in some instances dictate the creation of an entirely new role. But even this was not enough to please some fickle performers, who brought their favorite songs with them from other operas, insisting on their inclusion in a new production. The term diva, which would eventually be applied to these singers, is revealing of their high status: in Italian, the word means goddess, a veritable female deity. The challenges in pleasing such celestial beings are so extreme that the label of diva is sometimes used nowadays on a lesser talent, or even someone who doesn’t sing, provided their demands are sufficiently outrageous and their assertion of special privileges beyond the pale. This all started with the switch from opera as a private spectacle for a patron to a profit-driven entertainment business.

然而，这代表着女歌手社会地位发生了多么惊人的变化！想想看，直到16世纪后期，如第十二章所述，西方世界与歌唱最密切相关的两类女性工作者是妓女和修女。换句话说，女性的歌声要么是罪恶的诱惑……要么被锁在修道院里，只有上帝才能听到，而欲望驱使的男人则听不到。一个重要的转折点发生在16世纪70年代和80年代，当时费拉拉公爵阿方索二世·德斯特开始招募女歌手作为宫廷的常任成员。起初，这些女性与男性一起合唱，但最终形成了隔离的单一性别单位，称为“女士之伴”（ concerto delle donne）。其他贵族很快就效仿了这一新概念。如今我们很难理解这种做法在当时是多么新鲜刺激，尽管当时许多人肯定也感到了丑闻。一些观察家确信，这些女性实际上是妓女，她们的工作职责之一就是提供性服务。但现有证据表明，她们中的许多人不仅避免了丑闻，还凭借其歌唱技巧获得了理想的婚姻和巨大的社会声望。无论如何，在这个转折点上，音乐界发生了永久性的转变，歌女终于在妓院或尼姑庵之外找到了自己的职业道路。

Yet what an amazing change this represents in the social status of female vocalists! Consider the fact that, until the late sixteenth century, the two types of female workers most closely associated with singing in the Western world were, as noted in Chapter 12, prostitutes and nuns. In other words, the songs of females were either sinful seductions… or else kept under lock and key in the cloister, where they could be heard by God, and not lust-ridden men. A significant turning point occurred in the 1570s and 1580s, when Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, began enlisting female singers as permanent members of his court. At first, these women performed in ensemble with men, but eventually formed a segregated single-sex unit known as the concerto delle donne (the consort of ladies). Other nobles were quick to emulate this new concept. It’s hard for us today to grasp how fresh and exciting this approach was at the time, although many must have been scandalized as well. Some observers were convinced that these women were really courtesans who gave out sexual favors as part of their job descriptions. The available evidence tells a different story. It shows that many of these women not only avoided scandal, but secured desirable marriage matches and gained great social prestige via their vocal skills. In any event, the music world shifted permanently at this turning point, with singing women finally securing a career path outside of a brothel or nunnery.

然而，即使是雇佣这些歌手的赞助人，对这种新型表演者的技能和要求，可能也持有不同的看法。例如，令人不安的卡特琳娜·马丁内利案例，她在13岁时被迫接受医学检测，以证明她的贞洁，然后曼图亚公爵文森佐一世才会雇佣她。或许他只是想避免流言蜚语，确保宫廷中的女性表演者不受怀疑；又或许他想表明自己没有参与我们今天所说的性交易。但这项请求这提醒我们，在西方文化中，音乐与性总是紧密相连。因此，获准入场观看这些史无前例演出的观众，或许也会对情色阴谋有所猜测——或许是有所幻想——也就不足为奇了。

Yet even the patrons who hired these singers may have had mixed ideas about the skills and requirements for this new kind of performer. Note, for example, the disturbing case of Caterina Martinelli, who was forced to undergo a medical test to certify her virginity at the age of thirteen before Duke Vincenzo I of Mantua would hire her. Perhaps he was only trying to avoid scurrilous rumor and ensure that the female performers at his court were above suspicion; or maybe he wanted to make clear that he was not involved in what we would today call sex trafficking. But the request reminds us how much musical and sexual matters have always overlapped in Western culture. So who can be surprised that audiences allowed entrée to these unprecedented performances might also speculate—or perhaps fantasize—on matters of erotic intrigue.

对歌剧首席女高音的崇拜，在某种程度上代表了职业女歌手进化的下一步，也受到了这些性谣言和遐想的影响。在接下来的三个世纪里，歌剧一直被冠以近乎不光彩和罪恶的名声，有时甚至超越了界限。在十七世纪末的巴黎，一些杰出的男士试图安排与歌剧演员的私人会面，或邀请他们进入自己的包厢。许多这样的演员最终选择生活在贵族的“庇护”之下。人们甚至可以得出结论，最繁荣的职业道路是从舞台直接通往卧室。当时一位评论员开玩笑说，巴黎的一家歌剧院——音乐学院——应该改名为“爱的学院”。然而，这些场所并不需要成为挑逗场所来激怒那些较为拘谨的社群成员。舞台上呈现的活动本身就足够令人震惊，足以引发抗议。有多少部最受欢迎的歌剧与妓女、情妇、通奸者以及其他“堕落”女性有关？如今，诸如《茶花女》（实际上翻译为“堕落女性”）、《卡门》、《蝴蝶夫人》、《唐璜》以及其他经典歌剧等作品披上了合法性的光环，但这不应掩盖一个事实：它们是当时最前卫的娱乐作品^。6

The cult of the opera prima donna, which represents in some ways the next step in this evolution of the professional female singer, was also shaped by these sexual rumors and musings. For the next three centuries, opera retained a reputation that bordered on dishonorable and sinful, and sometimes crossed far beyond the border. In Paris at the close of the seventeenth century, eminent men tried to arrange private meetings with opera singers, or invited them into their private boxes. Many of these performers eventually opted to live under the ‘protection’ of a noble. One might even conclude that the most prosperous career path went directly from the stage to the bedroom. A commentator of the period joked that the Academy of Music, a Parisian opera house, ought to be renamed the “Academy of Love.” Yet these venues didn’t need to serve as pickup spots to upset the primmer members of the community. The activities presented onstage were sufficiently shocking to stir up protests. How many of the most popular operas deal with prostitutes, mistresses, adulterers, and other ‘fallen’ women? The aura of legitimacy attached today to works such as La Traviata (which translates, in effect, as “fallen woman”), Carmen, Madame Butterfly, Don Giovanni, and other canonic operas shouldn’t blind us to the fact that they were the edgiest entertainment of their day.⁶

然而，在同一时期，男性音乐家也发现自己受到了情色目光的注视。我怀疑，这种性共鸣与独唱伴奏音乐的日益流行有关。这种音乐自游吟诗人时代之前就一直是欧洲流行文化的重要组成部分，如今作为一种艺术表达形式，其发展势头更为强劲。我希望学者们有朝一日能对16、17世纪西方世界歌曲中第一人称语法结构的使用进行详细的统计分析，但即使粗略地研究一下歌词，也能发现这种音乐中意义与表达方式之间日益加深的张力。牧歌作曲家或许创作了需要多位歌手的精妙作品，但他们仍然觉得有必要在歌词中使用第一人称单数“我”。浪漫主义主题深受听众喜爱，也要求这种矛盾。然而，试想一下，蒙特威尔第创作了一首宣称“Ardo, avvampo, mi struggo, ardo: acorrete”（我燃烧，我着火，我被吞噬，我燃烧：奔跑）的歌曲，却只安排了八位歌手演唱，这是多么不协调啊。这究竟是一段亲密恋情的铺垫，还是一场狂欢的引诱？形式和内容脱节了，需要做出一些改变才能恢复失去的平衡^。7

Yet male musicians also found themselves subject to erotic gazes during the same period. I suspect that the sexual resonance on display was linked to the rising popularity of music featuring a solo singer backed by instrumental accompaniment, an important part of popular European culture since before the days of the troubadours, but now gaining greater momentum as a form of artistic expression. I hope scholars someday undertake a detailed statistical analysis of the use of first-person grammatical constructions in the songs of the Western world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but even a cursory examination of the lyrics shows the growing tension between meaning and delivery in this music. The madrigal composers might be writing elaborate works requiring several singers, yet they still felt compelled to use the first-person singular “I” in their texts. The romantic themes, so popular among listeners, demanded this contradiction. Yet consider the incongruity of Monteverdi composing a song declaring “Ardo, avvampo, mi struggo, ardo: acorrete” (I burn, I catch fire, I’m consumed, I burn: run), but setting it for performance by eight singers. Is this the setup for an intimate romance, or incitement for an orgy? Form and content were out of alignment, and something would need to change to restore the lost equilibrium.⁷

在同一时期，鲁特琴伴奏的独唱如此流行，这绝非巧合。鲁特琴作为诱惑者的乐器，深深地吸引了公众的想象力——看看莎士比亚戏剧中该乐器的各种出现，就能了解其与情色相关的范围。同样，自文艺复兴初期以来，鲁特琴演奏者这个性感主题就一直受到欧洲视觉艺术家的青睐，其肖像画常常唤起明显的情欲。乔瓦尼·卡里亚尼、贝尔纳多·斯特罗齐、瓦伦丁·德·布洛涅、亨德里克·特·布吕根等人的画作中，鲁特琴演奏者被描绘成浪漫的主人公，他们在愉悦听觉的同时，也威胁着听众的贞洁。正如我们所见，在虔诚（但秘密）的天主教徒威廉·伯德控制英国音乐出版专利的时期，并没有出版任何鲁特琴音乐。这或许是偶然事件或音乐品味的问题，但我怀疑其中可能也涉及某些道德方面的疑虑。即便如此，道德家们也注定会输掉这场斗争。公众想要的是诱人的音乐，这意味着伯德（以及其他人的）神圣复调音乐将不可避免地被迫在市场上与歌剧女主角和眼神清澈的鲁特琴演奏家的激情歌曲竞争。

It can hardly be a coincidence that solo singing with lute accompaniment was so popular during this same period. The lute captured the public’s imagination as the instrument of seducers—check out the various appearances of the instrument in Shakespeare’s plays to gauge the range of its erotic associations. By the same token, portraits of men playing the lute, a sexualized subject popular with European visual artists since the early days of the Renaissance, frequently evoked a marked lasciviousness. The lutenists who appear in paintings by Giovanni Cariani, Bernardo Strozzi, Valentin de Boulogne, Hendrick ter Brugghen, and others are presented as romantic protagonists, men who, while gratifying the ears, also threatened the chastity of their listeners. As we have seen, no lute music was published during the period when the ardent (but secret) Catholic William Byrd controlled the patent on music publishing in England. That may have been a matter of chance or musical taste, but I suspect certain moral qualms might have entered into the equation as well. Even so, the moralists were bound to lose this battle. The public wanted seductive music, and this meant that sacred polyphony by Byrd (and others) would inevitably be forced to compete in the marketplace with the passionate songs of opera divas and doe-eyed lutenists.

1600年左右，爱与性相关的文化也发生了转变——这是对封建思想的最终拒绝，这些思想早已过时，甚至沦为令人尴尬的时代错误——而这一转变不可避免地导致了西方音乐的深刻变革。很难夸大爱情抒情诗在当时的停滞不前，并非言过其实。正如蒙特威尔第的例子所示，歌曲经常重复彼特拉克在两个多世纪前就已带入意大利诗歌前沿的关于受苦情人的陈词滥调。彼特拉克本人也保留着许多在他出生时已有两个世纪历史的宫廷爱情精神的陈词滥调。世界已经改变，封建制度的束缚已在现实世界中消失，然而在故事叙述和流行歌曲领域，对理想化女性的奉承和受虐狂式的奉承仍然渗透到欧洲文化的各个角落。

A cultural shift in matters of love and sex was also taking place around the year 1600—a final rejection of feudal sentiments that had lingered far beyond their expiration date and turned into embarrassing anachronisms—and this move inevitably fed into the profound changes taking place in Western music. It’s hard to overstate the stagnancy of the love lyric at this juncture. As the example from Monteverdi shows, songs often repeated the same clichés of the suffering lover that Petrarch had brought into the forefront of Italian poetry more than two centuries before. And Petrarch himself was holding onto many of the clichés of the courtly love ethos that were two centuries old when he was born. The world had changed, and the constraints of feudalism had disappeared in the real world, yet in the fields of storytelling and popular songs, the notion of fawning, masochistic service to an idealized lady still permeated European culture at every turn.

如果我们无法理解这种矛盾，就很难理解米格尔·德·塞万提斯于1605年和1615年出版的两卷本《堂吉诃德》为何会产生如此深远的影响。这个故事不仅嘲讽了骑士为完美女士服务这一观念，还专门针对了那些歌颂这种观念的流行文化作品。主人公因沉迷于过多的通俗爱情故事而失去了理智，最终为了侍奉一位根本不存在的女士而踏上了荒诞的冒险之旅。塞万提斯并非词曲作家，但他的作品表明，这些老式的爱情歌词需要被更生动、更现实、更贴合17世纪新世界的东西所取代。在那个历史时期，莎士比亚正以约翰·福斯塔夫爵士的形象嘲讽骑士的虚伪，约翰·福斯塔夫爵士也许是他最受欢迎的角色——他出现在莎士比亚的三部戏剧中（并在另外两部戏剧中被提及），最后一次出现在《温莎的风流娘儿们》中，恰逢塞万提斯创作他著名小说的时间。莎士比亚 1613 年上演的已佚剧作《卡德尼奥的历史》显然是根据《堂吉诃德》中的一集改编的。想想当时最伟大的两位作家——实际上是他们各自国家的两位作家——的意义吧，他们几乎联手破坏了当时过时的浪漫主义观念。歌曲作曲家不可避免地也会走上同样的道路。

If we fail to grasp that incongruity, we can hardly understand why Don Quixote, published in two volumes by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605 and 1615, had such a profound effect. This story not only ridiculed the notion of knightly servitude to a perfect lady, but specifically targeted the popular culture works that celebrated it. The protagonist literally loses his mind from consuming too many popular romances, and ends up pursuing ridiculous adventures in service to a lady who doesn’t exist. Cervantes was not a songwriter, but his work signaled that these old-style love lyrics needed to be replaced with something more vibrant, more realistic, and more attuned to the new world of the seventeenth century. At that same point in history, Shakespeare was ridiculing knightly pretensions in the guise of Sir John Falstaff, perhaps his most popular character—he appears in three of the Bard’s plays (and is referenced in two others), the final time in The Merry Wives of Windsor, coinciding with Cervantes’s work on his famous novel. Shakespeare’s lost play The History of Cardenio, performed in 1613, was apparently based on an episode in Don Quixote. Consider the significance of the two greatest writers of the time—and indeed, of their respective nations—working almost in tandem to undermine the outdated romantic notions of their day. Composers of songs would inevitably follow along the same path.

此刻，最伟大的牧歌作曲家蒙特威尔第拥抱了歌剧，而歌剧这一语言风格将在未来三百年重新定义人类关系在音乐中的呈现方式。蒙特威尔第无法抛弃这种古老的形式。完全是——他的观众要求新的牧歌，他的才华也非常适合这种形式——但是，就像莎士比亚和塞万提斯一样，他一定明白旧的配方正在失去其美学力量。

This is the very moment when Monteverdi, the greatest madrigal composer, embraces opera, the idiom that will redefine how human relations are presented in musical settings over the next three hundred years. Monteverdi couldn’t abandon the older form entirely—his audience demanded new madrigals, and his talents were perfectly suited to the form—but, like Shakespeare and Cervantes, he must have understood that the old recipes were losing their aesthetic force.

此时，西方歌曲中出现了一道鸿沟。两种截然相反的愿景争夺着主导地位。那些追随过去模式的人仍然希望歌曲能够将听众引向超越现实的宏大境界，引向一个纯粹的柏拉图式理想境界，在那里，精神性、规范的人际关系和和谐的行为战胜了一切障碍，以闪耀的完美之光摆脱了日常生活的纷扰。这里所颂扬的情感常常沦为程式化的感伤，或被诗意的陈词滥调所束缚的虔诚而端庄的虔诚。但现在，出现了一种替代方案，一种能够唤起更贴近现实生活的歌曲，甚至可能夸大了人们相处时的混乱和激情的无序。

At this moment, a chasm enters into Western song. Two opposing visions contend for dominance. Those who followed the models of the past still wanted songs that drew audiences to something larger than reality, into a realm of purified Platonic ideals where spirituality, well-regulated human relations, and harmonious behavior triumphed over all obstacles, stepping out from the chaos of everyday life with glimmering perfection. The emotions celebrated here often collapsed into stylized sentimentality or a reverent and decorous devotion demarcated by poetic clichés. But now there was an alternative, a kind of song that evoked something closer to real life, perhaps even exaggerated the messiness and passionate disorder in how people deal with each other.

在过去，强大的领导者或宗教权威或许会决定这两种模式中哪一种最值得效仿。但在观众驱动艺术的新时代，原始情感提供了更引人入胜的奇观，并必然会战胜柏拉图式的理想。熵增混乱的歌曲注定会取代完美的赞歌——至少如果主办方希望卖票、让观众满座的话。这个过程必然会缓慢进行，一路上会有许多坎坷和暂时的逆转。但谁能怀疑终点呢？以任何合理的标准衡量，我们现在仍然生活在其中。

In an earlier day, powerful leaders or religious authorities might have dictated which of these two models most deserved emulation. But in the new era of audience-driven art, raw emotions offered a more compelling spectacle and would inevitably triumph over Platonic ideals. Songs of entropic messiness were destined to displace anthems of perfection—at least if the promoters hoped to sell tickets and fill the house. By necessity, this process would play out slowly, with many bumps and temporary reversals along the way. But who could doubt the endpoint? By any reasonable measure, we are still living in it now.

16

16

文化战争

Culture Wars

抱歉，在之前关于音乐领域社会经济变迁的讨论中，我很少关注宗教（及其世俗代表）。我或许给人留下了这样的印象：这种以听众为主导的新音乐很容易克服教会领袖的道德反对，而一种宽容的人文主义如今主宰着欧洲的文化生活。

I apologize for paying so little attention to religion (and its earthly representatives) in the preceding discussion of socioeconomic shifts in the music landscape. I perhaps have given the impression that this new audience-driven music easily overcame the moralizing objections of church leaders, and that a tolerant humanism now presided over the cultural life of Europe.

这简直是​​天方夜谭。更为极端的宗教权威竭力阻止几乎所有音乐创新的推进，他们提出了形形色色的论据，反对任何实质性的现状改变。他们是狂热的辩论家，用音乐史学家罗布·韦格曼的话说，在“素歌与虚荣之间”划出尖锐的战线。然而，他们言论的狂热掩盖不了这些神父缺乏教会前辈们的权威。他们挑起了无数的争论和冲突，但最终却无一幸免。教会不再拥有禁止新音乐表达方式的权力，只能满足于仅仅审查那些最公然违反公共道德的行为。然而，那些坚守宗教原则的人从未心甘情愿地默许这种低级的、不公正的、不公正的、不公平 ...扮演着重要的角色，并且——事实上，仍在——不断地介入各种音乐事务。有时，他们会制定计划，阻止不受欢迎的变革。如果失败，他们就试图施加影响，拉拢人心。而如果失败，他们就只能自顾自地哀嚎切齿。说实话，哀嚎切齿已经很多了^。1

Nothing could be further from the truth. More extreme religious authorities worked to halt the advance of almost every innovation in music, mustering a hodgepodge of arguments against any substantive change to the status quo. They were ardent polemicists who drew sharp battle lines “between plainchant and vainchant,” in the colorful words of music historian Rob Wegman. But the fervor of their pronouncements could not hide the fact that these priests lacked the power of their ecclesiastical predecessors. They stirred up countless debates and conflicts, but over the long run lost every one of them. The church no longer possessed the clout to prohibit new modes of musical expression, and had to settle for merely censoring the most blatant violations of public decency. Yet the upholders of religious scruples never acquiesced willingly in this lesser role, and made—in fact, continue to make—constant incursions into musical matters of all sorts. Sometimes they hatched plans to halt unwelcome change in its tracks. Failing that, they aimed to influence and co-opt. And, failing that, they settled for wailing and gnashing of teeth among themselves. Truth to tell, there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth.¹

如今，声乐复音被认为是天主教音乐文化的巅峰，但即使是这一创新也遭遇了疯狂的抵制。早在1242年，多明我会就颁布了声乐复音的禁令。加尔都西会在1324年也采取了同样的措施，我们在本笃会、熙笃会和其他修会中也发现了类似的举措。教皇亲自出面干预，颁布了第一部专门针对音乐的教皇法令。在《圣徒之死》（Docta sanctorum partum，1324/1325）中，教皇约翰二十二世痛斥“那些热衷于分裂节拍的新学派信徒”，他们“编造新音符，比唱旧音符更爱唱”。他们的音乐“充斥着各种音符。他们用霍克特音符肢解旋律，唱着俗丽的二重唱，频繁地在白话文中插入第二声部和第三声部……他们不知道自己建立在什么之上。”教皇并未禁止复音，但希望对其进行限制，并试图引导作曲家们采用他偏爱的音程：八度、四度和五度。（历史的讽刺之处在于，教会在六个多世纪的时间里都没有选出另一位教皇约翰，但这位教皇，即第二次梵蒂冈大公会议的发起人约翰二十三世，不仅没有维护其前任的传统主义，反而开启了天主教历史上对音乐现代主义最热烈的拥抱。）²

Vocal polyphony is today considered a high point of Catholic musical culture, but even this innovation encountered a maniacal degree of resistance. The Dominicans issued a prohibition of vocal polyphony as far back as 1242. The Carthusians did the same in 1324, and we find similar measures among Benedictines, Cistercians, and other religious orders. The pope himself intervened, issuing the first papal decree dealing solely with music. In Docta sanctorum partum (1324/1325), Pope John XXII railed against “disciples of the new school, concerned with dividing the beat,” who “fabricate new notes which they prefer to sing more than the old ones.” Their music “is choked with notes. They dismember melodies with hockets and sing lubricious discants, frequently inserting second and third voices in the vernacular.… They know not upon what they build.” The pope stopped short of prohibiting polyphony, but wanted to see it limited, and tried to steer composers toward his preferred intervals: the octave, the fourth, and the fifth. (In a curious irony of history, the church would not elect another Pope John for more than six centuries, but that pontiff, John XXIII, instigator of the Second Vatican Council, not only failed to uphold his predecessor’s traditionalism but set in motion the most ardent embrace of musical modernism in the history of Catholicism.)²

这些神职人员为何厌恶复调音乐？简而言之，他们认为复调音乐会煽动人们犯罪。在十四世纪的一部著作中，英国神学家约翰·威克里夫谴责复调音乐是“虚荣的把戏”，“它煽动虚荣的人跳舞”。神秘主义者兼神学家加尔都西会修士丹尼斯（Denis the Carthusian，1402-1471）认为“这类音乐中充斥着骄傲和某种淫荡”。多明我会修士乔瓦尼·卡罗利（Giovanni Caroli）则援引了前文多次提到的那种常见的诽谤，即将音乐中的道德缺陷归咎于其女性特质。“那些复调音乐既是新的，也是“闻所未闻，”他宣称，“事实上，我相当憎恨和厌恶这些东西，因为它们似乎更多地与女性的轻浮有关，而不是与男主角的尊严有关。”这种女性音乐必然会受到攻击，而后又被合法化，这一过程不应再令我们感到惊讶。但我们很难忽视这样一个奇怪之处：当同样的歌曲受到后世的赞扬时，评论家们却不再提请注意音乐中的女性特质。音乐中的女性特质似乎只有在受到攻击的背景下才值得一提^。3

Why did these clerics dislike polyphony? The short answer is that they saw it as an incitement to sin. In a fourteenth-century work, the English theologian John Wycliffe denounced the “vain tricks” of polyphony “which stir vain men to dancing.” The mystic and theologian Denis the Carthusian (1402–1471) identified “pride and a certain lasciviousness in music of this kind.” The Dominican Giovanni Caroli turned to the familiar calumny, already seen many times in the preceding pages, that assigned moral weakness in music to its feminine qualities. “Those polyphonies are both new and unheard of,” he declared. “Indeed I rather hate and detest those things, since they most truly seem to pertain more to the levity of women than to the dignity of leading men.” The inevitable process by which this feminine music gets attacked and later legitimized should no longer surprise us. But we can hardly ignore the peculiarity that when the same songs are praised by later generations, the commentators no longer call attention to the womanly nature of the music. Femininity in music is only worth mentioning, it seems, in the context of an attack.³

这场争论在教会内部持续发酵，直至特伦托会议（1545-1563）召开。会议中，一项禁止复调音乐的提案被纳入初步建议草案，但并未正式生效。一则广为流传的轶事声称，帕莱斯特里纳的一场弥撒改变了批评者们的想法。这位伟大的礼拜音乐作曲家凭一己之力拯救复调音乐，这本身就是一个鼓舞人心的故事，但任何此类英雄事迹的证据都显得苍白无力。无论如何，这种进步音乐的反对者最终让步——尽管那时教堂复调音乐已不是什么新鲜事物，而且对罗马教会在音乐领域影响力的更切实的威胁也随处可见。会议最终决定，对侵入教堂仪式的流行音乐和舞曲进行例行谴责，并强调礼拜仪式中使用的歌词必须清晰易懂。

This battle continued to simmer within the church until the Council of Trent (1545–1563), where a proposal to ban polyphony made it into the preliminary draft recommendations, although not the decrees. An oft-told anecdote claims that a performance of a mass by Palestrina changed the critics’ minds. The notion of this great composer of liturgical music single-handedly saving polyphony makes for an inspiring tale, but the evidence for any such heroic intervention is weak. In any event, opponents of this progressive music backed down—although by then church polyphony was hardly new, and more tangible threats to the Church of Rome’s influence in musical matters loomed everywhere. The council settled for a formulaic denunciation of popular music and dance songs intruding into church rituals, and an insistence on the clarity of the words used during services.

这些宣言或许被过度解读了。到了这个时候，宗教领袖们已经找到了更具创造性的方式来影响音乐文化。即使在教会权力鼎盛时期，诸如逐出教会和宗教会议法令之类的笨拙手段也未能阻止音乐的越轨行为。到了特伦托会议时期，这些手段只不过是象征性的姿态或发泄的机会。一条更有希望的道路是吸纳创新，吸收而不是禁止，并将其力量用于侍奉上帝。我在童年时期亲眼目睹了这个过程，当时那些谴责吉他主导的流行音乐的教会最终推出了吉他宗教仪式，希望吸引青少年。起初，这些仪式相当平淡，类似于库姆巴亚音乐节，但在20世纪70年代末，基督教重金属音乐首次亮相，随后在20世纪80年代中期，第一批基督教嘻哈音乐录音问世，每一次都是半心半意地试图与魔鬼做交易——但只有在更严厉的遏制手段失败后才被接受。这种拉拢之路从来都不是首选，而总是最后或倒数第二的手段。当然，最后的阶段往往是连拉拢都失败了，宗教领袖们从战场上撤退，在这场从一开始就注定要输的文化战争中血流成河。

Too much is made, perhaps, of these proclamations. By this time, religious leaders had found more creative ways of influencing the musical culture. Clumsy tools such as excommunication and council decrees had failed to halt musical transgressions even during the period of the church’s greatest power. By the time of the Council of Trent, they served as little more than symbolic gestures or opportunities to vent. A more promising path was to co-opt the innovation, assimilate rather than prohibit, and channel its power into the service of God. I saw this process firsthand during my childhood, when the same churches that denounced guitar-driven popular music eventually launched guitar religious services with hopes of attracting teens. At first these were fairly tame Kum-ba-yah-ish events, but in the late 1970s Christian heavy metal music made its debut, followed in the mid-1980s by the first recordings of Christian hip-hop, each a half-hearted attempt to make a deal with the devil—but embraced only after harsher methods of containment had failed. This path of co-option is never the first resort, but is always the last, or next-to-last. The final stage, of course, is frequently the moment when even co-opting has failed and religious leaders retreat from the battlefield, bloodied from a culture war they were destined to lose from the start.

我们已经看到圣弗朗西斯在他的《太阳颂》中借用了游吟诗人的习语，如果我们不理解圣母玛利亚崇拜对理想化女士的敬意与流行歌曲和故事中的浪漫渴望有多么相似，我们就很难理解同一时期传遍欧洲的圣母玛利亚崇拜的力量。然而，这种吸收的过程并不局限于基督教欧洲。在同一时期的中国，儒家学者继续对 1500 多年前收集的《诗经》中的民歌进行道德解读。哲学家朱熹（1130-1200）的一番看似平淡的评价引起了激烈的争论，他认为其中一些歌曲“来自街头巷尾的民歌。青年男女互相歌唱，表达他们的爱和感情。”然而，这种理智而直白的观点却暗示，中国文化中那些备受推崇的作品，用汉学家陈匡昱的话来说，其实是“由放荡不羁的年轻女性创作的。即使在最自由的社会——古代中国不太可能如此——也很难想象如此多由放荡女性创作的歌曲会进入官方收藏，成为正统的学术文本。”这场斗争在21世纪仍在继续，一些学者仍在努力将这些民歌转化为不那么羞耻、更符合制度认可的道德价值观的作品^。4

We have already seen St. Francis borrow the idiom of the troubadours in his “Canticle of the Sun,” and we can hardly grasp the power of the cult of the Virgin Mary, spreading throughout Europe during this same period, without understanding how closely its homage to an idealized lady resembled the romantic yearnings found in popular songs and stories. Yet this process of co-option was hardly restricted to Christian Europe. In China around this same time, Confucian scholars continued to impose moralistic interpretations on the folk songs of the Shijing, collected more than 1,500 year earlier. Philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200) stirred up an intense controversy with the seemingly bland assessment that some of these songs “came from streets and alleys as folk songs. Youth, male and female, sang to each other, expressing their love and feelings.” Yet this sensible, straightforward view implied that revered works of Chinese culture were, in the words of Sinologist Kuang Yu Chen, “composed by licentious or promiscuous young women. Even in the most liberal society, which ancient China was unlikely to be, it is hard to imagine that so many songs made by licentious women would enter the official collection and become an orthodox scholarly text.” This battle continues in the twenty-first century, with some scholars still striving to turn these same folk songs into something less shameful and more attuned to institutionally sanctioned moral values.⁴

然而，在同一时期，印度出现了一个更为非凡的道德吸纳范例。十二世纪梵语诗人兼作曲家贾亚德瓦（Jayadeva）创作的抒情史诗《歌文达》（Gita Govinda），是一部情色灵性的杰作，颂扬了挤奶女工拉达（Radha）对印度教神祇克里希纳（Krishna）的热烈渴望。在此之前，拉达在印度教的精神世界里扮演着不起眼的角色，但正如欧洲对圣母玛利亚的崇拜一样，她如今占据了更为突出的地位。后来，许多诗人、歌手和舞蹈家都以这个爱情故事为基础，将感官冲动转化为精神表达。当然，这样一个情色故事需要一种净化的诠释——正如犹太-基督教机构给《雅歌》赋予了精神色彩，儒家学者净化了《诗经》 。对于《薄伽梵歌》的虔诚读者来说，情欲被转化为神圣的爱，而性结合则是人类拥抱神的象征。

Yet a far more extraordinary example of moralistic co-option appeared in India at this same juncture. The Gita Govinda, a lyrical epic by the twelfth-century Sanskrit poet and composer Jayadeva, is a masterpiece of erotic spirituality celebrating the passionate desire of the milkmaid Radha for the Hindu deity Krishna. Up until this point, Radha had played a modest role in Hindu spirituality, but as with the cult of the Madonna in Europe, she now took on a far more prominent position, and a host of later poets, singers, and dancers drew on this same love story as the basis for their own channeling of sensual impulse into spiritual expression. Of course, such an erotic tale required a purifying interpretation—just as Judeo-Christian institutions imposed a spiritual gloss on the Song of Songs, and the Confucian scholars cleansed the Shijing. For devout readers of the Gita Govinda, lust is transmuted into holy love, and sexual union serves as a symbol for humanity’s embrace of the divine.

情色灵性这一主题的影响范围远超音乐，要全面阐述它将涉及密宗修行、卡巴拉以及我们视野之外的许多其他领域。深入探究便会发现，这种宗教虔诚与肉欲的混合常常以笨拙而精心策划的方式展现，但也能创造出最高尚的文化作品。只需看看但丁的诗歌，就能明白神学与流行文化元素以及浪漫主义公式的融合如何将看似对立的事物调和成划时代的杰作。试想一下，一位作家在一部作品（《新生》）中将他现实生活中的爱人（贝阿特丽斯·波蒂纳里饰）塑造成他充满激情的爱情歌词中的对象，然后在另一部作品（《神曲》）中又将她安排为天堂的导游，这是多么奇特的一件事。然而，但丁的策略却奏效了——事实上，正因他自信地断言肉欲可以成为神圣的通道，才更令人愉悦。从纯粹的音乐角度来看，这种融合感性与超越的追求远比人们通常认为的要强大得多。它对作曲家们产生了持续的吸引力，从古代美索不达米亚恩赫杜安娜的赞美诗到约翰·柯川的《至爱》，各种作品都展现了这一点。在一些例子中，整个乐章都采用了建立在肉欲与神圣之间精湛平衡之上的全新音乐表达方式。

The subject of erotic spirituality has many ramifications beyond music, and a full account of it would delve into tantric practices, the Kabbalah, and many other areas beyond our purview. An in-depth survey would make clear that this hybrid of religious devotion and carnal desire often manifests itself in clumsy and calculated ways, but can also produce cultural works of the highest order. One need look no further than the poetry of Dante to see how the mixture of theology with elements of popular culture and the formulas of romance can reconcile seeming opposites into an epoch-defining masterpiece. Consider for a moment the oddity of an author who turns his real-life beloved (Beatrice Portinari) into the object of his passionate love lyrics in one work (La Vita Nuova), and then installs her as a tour guide to heaven in another (The Divine Comedy). Yet somehow Dante’s ploy works—indeed, is all the more pleasing because of its confident assertion that physical desire can serve as a conduit for the sacred. From a purely musical perspective, this quest to merge sensuality and transcendence is a much more powerful force than is usually acknowledged. It has exerted a constant pull on composers, as demonstrated by diverse works spanning the range from the hymns of Enheduanna in ancient Mesopotamia to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. In a few instances, entire movements have embraced new ways of musical expression built on a virtuosic balancing of the carnal and the holy.

例如，我们在孟加拉的巴乌尔人身上就可以看到这一点，他们是南亚的精神吟游诗人，他们的音乐神秘主义受到了指责人们不认为他们是疯子或享乐主义者，但几个世纪以来，他们也一直是人们的榜样，他们的世界观在跨越文化和世代鸿沟方面表现出惊人的韧性。一个世纪前，泰戈尔从他们的灵感中汲取灵感，推动了孟加拉文化的跨学科复兴，并因此获得了诺贝尔文学奖，成为欧洲和北美以外第一位获得此殊荣的人。（顺便说一句，那些抱怨鲍勃·迪伦——他曾自称是“美国的鲍尔”——获得诺贝尔奖，声称词曲作者不应该被考虑获奖的人应该注意，泰戈尔写了两千多首歌曲，并为两个不同的国家创作了国歌。）半个世纪后，鲍尔兄弟通过迪伦和垮掉的一代诗人艾伦·金斯堡等代表人物在西方反主流文化中找到了新的追随者。人们很容易嘲笑这些文化明星信奉适合大众媒体报道的时髦神秘主义；然而，如果这种感官与精神的融合未能满足商业娱乐盛行意识形态所未能满足的深层渴望，这种跨界几乎不可能发生。这种混合体在未来以难以预测的音乐形式再次出现，很可能，甚至不可避免，而矛盾的是，流行文化霸权的主导地位恰恰确保了这一点，而这种霸权似乎对此类形而上学的冒险免疫^。5

We see this, for example, in the Bauls of Bengal, spiritual minstrels of South Asia whose musical mysticism has led to accusations that they are mad or hedonistic; yet they have also served as role models for centuries, and their worldview has shown surprising resilience in crossing cultural and generational divides. A century ago, Rabindranath Tagore drew on their inspiration to propel a cross-disciplinary renaissance in Bengali culture, and as a result earned the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first person outside Europe and North America to receive that honor. (By the way, those who grumbled when Bob Dylan—who once described himself as an “American Baul”—won the Nobel Prize, claiming that songwriters weren’t supposed to be considered for the award, should note that Tagore wrote more than two thousand songs and composed the national anthem for two different countries.) A half century later, the Bauls found new followers among the Western counterculture via exponents such as Dylan and beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It’s easy to deride these cultural stars for their embrace of fashionable mysticism suitable for coverage in the mass media; yet this crossover could hardly have happened if its merging of the sensual and spiritual didn’t answer a deep-seated hunger left unsatisfied by the prevailing ideologies of commercial entertainment. The recurrence of this hybrid in the future, in musical formats impossible to predict, is likely, perhaps even inevitable, and paradoxically ensured by the very dominance of a pop culture hegemony seemingly immunized against such metaphysical ventures.⁵

但神圣与感性融合的最有力例证来自伊斯兰世界。波斯人物贾拉勒·丁·鲁米几乎囊括了上述所有主题。与但丁一样，鲁米是一位颂扬超然感性的诗人。与圣方济各一样，他推动了一场宗教运动，并获得了精神智慧源泉的权威地位。与孟加拉的巴乌尔一样，他在现代被流行文化和新时代运动所接纳，他们以巧妙、有时甚至有些别扭的方式传达着他的影响力。在亚马逊上快速搜索鲁米周边商品，你会看到琳琅满目的商品：鲁米咖啡杯、鲁米手机壳、鲁米挂历、鲁米应用程序、鲁米婴儿服装以及其他家居、办公和旅行用品。寻找鲁米背后的真实历史人物所有这些都是一项艰巨的任务，我钦佩学者富兰克林·刘易斯（Franklin Lewis）的方法。他是英语版鲁米研究最权威的指南，在其长达七百页的研究中，分别对“神话”版鲁米和“传记”版鲁米进行了探讨。刘易斯深知事实固然重要，但也深知神话有时在传播运动或激励后世方面更为有效^。6

But the most powerful example of the merging of the sacred and the sensual comes from the Islamic world. The Persian figure Jalal al-Din Rumi brings together almost all the themes mentioned above. Like Dante, Rumi was a poet who celebrated a transcendent sensuality. Like St. Francis, he propelled a religious movement and gained authority as a source of spiritual wisdom. Like the Bauls of Bengal, he has been adopted in modern times by pop culture and New Age audiences, who channel his influence in ingenious and sometimes awkward ways. A quick search on Amazon for Rumi-oriented merchandise comes back with an amazing range of offerings: Rumi coffee mugs, Rumi cellphone cases, Rumi wall calendars, Rumi apps, Rumi baby clothes, and other items for home, office, and travel. Finding the real historical figure behind all this is a daunting task, and I admire the approach of scholar Franklin Lewis, the most authoritative guide to Rumi in English, who provides separate discussions in his seven-hundred-page study of the “mythological” Rumi and the “biographical” Rumi. Lewis grasps that facts are important, but also knows that myth is sometimes even more effective in propagating a movement or inspiring posterity.⁶

所有这些很容易让人忽视鲁米对音乐的影响（他很少出现在音乐史书中）。然而，通过创立萨玛仪式——一种融合了音乐、舞蹈、诗歌、冥想和祈祷的苏菲派仪式——他创造了或许是世界各大信条中最有力的典范，将人类的审美和精神冲动融入到成文的狂喜实践中。这是一次大胆的尝试，试图弥合许多人至今仍认为无法弥合的鸿沟。批评家们认为，它代表了神圣与世俗的不可接受的融合。正如富兰克林·刘易斯所指出的，音乐和舞蹈“与宫廷、女奴、饮酒和放荡联系在一起”。它们在伊斯兰社会并非一直被禁止，但任何试图将这些可疑活动纳入宗教仪式的行为都充满了危险。而这场争议在750多年后的今天仍未结束。联合国或许已将土耳其的萨玛仪式指定为我们人类共同文化遗产的“杰作”，但该仪式在1923年土耳其共和国成立后被禁止。1956年，限制有所放松，起源可追溯至鲁米的梅夫拉维教团获得了一些有限的自由。然而，这些“旋转舞者”（这些舞者通常被称为旋转舞者）的表演更多地被鼓励作为旅游景点，而非宗教仪式——因此，伊朗政府坚持要求该仪式必须在公共场所进行，而非私下进行。伊朗的旋转舞者持续面临政府的骚扰，针对旋转舞者的不道德和亵渎神明的指控，与针对颠覆性音乐传统的常见指控如出一辙。但这里有一个奇怪的转折：这些攻击并非针对世俗主义或流行音乐的倡导者。艺人，而是一种宗教活动，其内容只是音乐和舞蹈^。7

It would be easy to lose sight of Rumi’s influence on music in all this (and he rarely appears in music history books). Yet by establishing the Sama ritual—a Sufi ceremony integrating music, dance, poetry, meditation, and prayer—he created what is perhaps the most powerful model within the world’s major creeds for integrating the human aesthetic and spiritual impulses into a codified practice of ecstasy. This was a bold endeavor, an attempt to bridge a gulf that many still see as unbridgeable. For critics, it represented an unacceptable merger of the sacred and profane. Music and dancing, as Franklin Lewis notes, “were associated with royal courts, slave girls, wine drinking and debauchery.” They weren’t always prohibited within Islamic society, but any attempt to include such suspect activities in religious rituals was fraught with danger. And the controversy has hardly ended today, more than 750 years later. The United Nations may have designated the Sama ceremony of Turkey a “masterpiece” of our shared human cultural heritage, but the practice was banned after the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. In 1956, restrictions were loosened and the Mevlevi Order, which traces its origins back to Rumi, was granted some limited freedom. But these performances of the “Whirling Dervishes,” as the practitioners are often called, have been encouraged more as tourist attractions than as religious ceremonies—hence the peculiar insistence that the ritual be performed in public, not private. Practitioners in Iran continue to face government harassment, and accusations of immorality and sacrilege against dervishes repeat familiar charges against subversive musical traditions. But there is an odd twist here: the attacks aren’t directed at advocates of secularism or popular musical entertainers, but at a religious practice that simply brings music and dance within its purview.⁷

宗教生活机构或许有充分的理由惧怕这些闯入者。在有组织的信仰框架内，音乐和舞蹈是通往狂喜状态的最可靠途径——或许除了那些将迷幻蘑菇或其他致幻物质作为“虔诚”仪式一部分的边缘邪教。但狂喜本身就充满风险，尤其对于那些将“组织”纳入有组织宗教的宗教机构和官僚机构而言。我甚至不确定教堂里的教友是否真的想尝试更多。狂喜具有破坏性。过量服用，宗教就会变得混乱。

The institutions of religious life perhaps have good reason to fear these intruders in their midst. Music and dance offer the surest path to ecstatic trance within the framework of organized faiths—perhaps with the exception of those marginalized cults that consume magical mushrooms or other mind-altering substances as part of their ‘devotional’ practice. But ecstasy is risky business, especially for those institutions and bureaucracies of faith that put the ‘organization’ into organized religion. I’m not even sure that parishioners in the pews want more than a tiny taste of it. Ecstasy is disruptive. Too much of it, and you have disorganized religion.

社会学家经常提出一个令人困惑的问题：宗教和邪教之间究竟有何区别？有人认为，仅仅是成员数量就足以区分两者。当信徒发展成为一个足够庞大的投票集团或消费群体时，他们就从危险的邪教组织晋升为受人​​尊敬的信条持有者。然而，邪教与宗教之间最显著的区别或许仅仅在于他们对“摇头丸”截然不同的态度。邪教承诺一种超越常规的另类体验。而传统宗教则对此类行为心存恐惧，这往往会影响他们对音乐的态度。

Social scientists have often asked a troubling question: What’s the difference between a religion and a cult? Some will suggest that membership numbers alone make the difference. When practitioners turn into a suitably large voting bloc or consumer group, they rise from dangerous cult-hood to respectable creed-holders. Yet the most significant difference between a cult and a religion might simply be the contrasting attitudes toward ecstasy. The cult promises an alternative experience beyond the normal. Established religions are fearful of such practices, and this always influences their attitudes toward music.

然而，我们必须惊叹世俗——甚至据称是罪恶的——音乐与宗教教条之间不可思议的兼容性。我们已经追溯了奴隶影响流行歌曲演变的奇特路径，将奴役和束缚的概念植入统治阶级的音乐。这或许是颠覆性音乐悠久历史中最具颠覆性的举动。然而，请稍加思考，这些概念对于浪漫主义音乐和宗教音乐来说是多么契合。相同的意象、相同的语言、相同的隐喻在两种音乐类型中都占据着显著的位置，并在两者之间无缝衔接。征服和奉献的概念在我们音乐文化的各个领域都无处不在。当乌比·戈德堡在电影《修女也疯狂》中扮演一位躲避暴民的酒吧歌手教修女们唱歌时，观众们笑了。摩城唱片的热门单曲《我的家伙》（My Guy）被改编成了《我的上帝》（My God）。神圣与世俗的界限本不该如此轻易被打破。然而，它们却一次又一次地被打破。无论我们的社会地位如何——贫民还是国王，流行歌星还是牧师，说唱歌手还是歌星——当我们歌唱时，我们都是自下而上地歌唱。我们崇拜我们的理想，可能是神灵，也可能是恋人，有时我们甚至会分不清哪一个才是我们虔诚歌曲的目标。那么，当我们发现音乐和宗教创新如此频繁地来自社会权力结构之外的人时，我们应该感到惊讶吗？两者的本质，或者我们围绕它们构建的结构，使得我们倾向于在城市危险地带的铁轨对面，寻找通往狂喜的新道路，无论是音乐上的还是其他方面的。

Yet we must marvel at the uncanny compatibility between secular—and even allegedly sinful—music and religious dogma. We have already followed the strange path by which slaves influenced the evolution of popular song, inserting notions of servitude and bondage into the music of the ruling class. This may be the most subversive act in a long history of subversive music. Yet consider, for one moment, how suitable these concepts are for both romantic and religious music. The same images, the same language, the same metaphors figure prominently in both genres, moving seamlessly from one to another. The notions of subjugation and devotion are pervasive in all spheres of our musical culture. Audiences laugh when Whoopi Goldberg, playing the part of a lounge singer hiding out from the mob in the film Sister Act, teaches the nuns to sing the Motown hit single “My Guy,” but modified into “My God.” The boundaries between sacred and profane should not be so easily breached. Yet they are, and again and again. No matter our place in the social hierarchy—pauper or king, pop star or minister, rapper or diva—when we sing, we sing from the bottom looking up. We adore our ideal, which might be a deity or a romantic partner, and maybe sometimes even we are confused which of these is the target of our devotional song. Should we be surprised, then, when we find musical and religious innovations coming so often from those operating outside the power structures of society? Something in the nature of both, or in the constructs we have built around them, makes us predisposed to look for that new path to ecstasy, musical or otherwise, residing across the tracks in the dodgy side of town.

因此，当我们发现宗教机构大胆地借鉴它们先前斥为粗俗的歌曲风格时，我们不应感到惊讶。即便如此，我们如今所看到的或许是西方文化史上宗教冲动与流行音乐最奇特的融合。罗马教会面对日益盛行的歌剧，决定阉割男歌手或许是恰当的回应。在这一领域，阉割的做法也涵盖了世俗音乐和宗教音乐。即使在教会内部，阉割的男孩也长期以来被视为宗教唱诗班的宝贵补充。他们的声音被认为是天使般的，是圣徒在天堂所能听到的美妙声音的先兆。由于这些唱诗班禁止女性和女孩加入，因此，唯一能够享受这些天籁般高音而又不跨越鸿沟的途径是通过嗓音尚未变质的年轻男孩，也就是阉人歌手。阉人歌手中的许多人既在歌剧舞台上演唱，也在教堂里演唱，还有一些从未接受过手术的人也一样。 17世纪末18世纪初的威尼斯记录显示，圣马可教堂唱诗班约有40名成员也从事歌剧工作——这再次打破了圣歌与世俗歌曲之间的界限。然而，阉伶似乎在娱乐界享有特殊的吸引力。最受青睐的阉伶可以要求天文数字般的报酬，甚至比著名作曲家的报酬还要高，而且除了合同规定的酬金外，他们还收到了仰慕者的慷慨馈赠。阉伶歌唱家卡法雷利凭借音乐赚得盆满钵满，最终买下了一个公爵领地，并在自己的意大利庄园里建造了一座宫殿。

So we should never be surprised when we find religious institutions boldly borrowing from the same song styles they previously denounced as vulgar. Even so, we have now arrived at what may be the most bizarre merging of religious impulse and popular music in the history of Western culture. The Church of Rome confronted the growing popularity of opera and decided that castrating male singers might be an appropriate response. Here, too, the practice spanned both secular and sacred music. Even within the church, castrated boys had long been viewed as valuable additions to religious choirs. Their voices were considered angelic, a taste of what the saints might hear in heaven. Since these choirs prevented women and girls from membership, the only way to savor those celestial high notes without crossing the great divide was via young boys, before their voices broke, or castrati. Many of the latter sang both on the opera stage and in church, as did others who never went under the surgeon’s knife. Venetian records from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries show that around forty members of St. Mark’s choir also worked in opera—here, again, the dividing line between saintly and secular song is contravened with ease. Yet the castrati seemed to have enjoyed a special appeal in the world of entertainment. The most favored could demand astronomical sums, more than celebrated composers, and in addition to their contracted fees received generous gifts from admirers. The castrato Caffarelli made so much money from his music that he eventually bought a dukedom and built a palace on his Italian estate.

然而，即便阉人歌手成为超级巨星，一种普遍的耻辱氛围依然笼罩着这些成就了他们辉煌职业生涯的行当。当音乐史学家查尔斯·伯尼（Charles Burney，1726-1814）试图了解更多关于这种手术的信息时，他处处受阻。“我走遍了意大利，询问哪些男孩主要通过阉割获得歌唱资格，但却得不到任何确切的信息，”他抱怨道。“在米兰，我被告知在威尼斯；在威尼斯，是在博洛尼亚；但在博洛尼亚，他们否认了这一事实，并把我送往佛罗伦萨；从佛罗伦萨到罗马，我又从罗马被送往那不勒斯。在所有这些地方，这种手术无疑是违法的，也是违反自然的；所有意大利人都对此感到非常羞耻，以至于他们在每个省都把它转移到其他省。”梵蒂冈从未正式批准过这种手术，有时甚至威胁要将实施这种手术的外科医生逐出教会。然而，这种结果不仅被容忍，而且受到鼓励，因为阉伶歌手的声音据称非常崇高，而且教会也明确表示希望将女性——这些危险的诱惑者——从可能激发不纯洁思想的表演场所中移除^。8

Yet even as the castrati emerged as superstars, a pervasive aura of shame surrounded the practices that gave rise to their illustrious careers. When music historian Charles Burney (1726–1814) tried to learn more about the surgery, he was stonewalled at every turn. “I enquired throughout Italy where boys were chiefly qualified for singing by castration, but could get no certain intelligence,” he griped. “I was told at Milan that it was at Venice; at Venice it was at Bologna; but at Bologna the fact was denied, and I was referred to Florence; from Florence to Rome, and from Rome I was sent to Naples. The operation most certainly is against the law in all these places, as well as against nature; and all the Italians are so much ashamed of it, that in every province they transfer it to some other.” The Vatican never officially approved the procedure, and sometimes even threatened surgeons who practiced it with excommunication. Yet the results were not only tolerated but encouraged, both for the alleged sublimity of the castrato’s voice and the church’s stated desire to remove women, those dangerous temptresses, from performance situations where they might inspire impure thoughts.⁸

这一传统的终结和起源一样难以在档案中追溯。直到1913年，阉伶歌手亚历山德罗·莫雷斯基还在西斯廷教堂演唱——他是唯一一位录制独唱唱片的阉伶歌手，而且他的演唱录音实际上在梵蒂冈录制过。但有人推测，在教皇唱诗班演出至1959年的女高音多梅尼科·曼奇尼也是一位阉伶歌手，尽管除了他精湛的假声唱法外，几乎没有其他证据支持这一说法。谁知道梵蒂冈档案中还有哪些信息尚未公布？2001年，意大利报纸《晚邮报》敦促教皇向这一习俗的受害者——阉伶歌手正式道歉，但我们对其全部范围以及参与维护这一习俗的各方的了解，仍然大多停留在猜测阶段。在很多情况下，当时的记载都通过提供一些模糊的事故轶事来回避这个问题——这无疑加剧了人们对阉伶歌手的担忧。腹股沟受伤、动物袭击、从马上摔下来——这些都是轻信者可以接受的合理解释。

The termination of this tradition is as hard to track in the archives as its origins. As late as 1913, the castrato Alessandro Moreschi sang in the Sistine Chapel—he is the only castrato to make solo recordings, and he was actually recorded at the Vatican. But some have speculated that soprano Domenico Mancini, who performed in the papal choir until 1959, was also a castrato, although there is little evidence to back this up besides his skill in the falsetto register. Who knows what information still sits unreleased in the Vatican archives? In 2001, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera urged the pope to make a formal apology to the castrati who were the victims of this practice, but our knowledge of its full extent and the parties complicit in its maintenance is still mostly a matter of conjecture. In many instances, contemporary accounts avoided the matter by serving up vague anecdotes about accidents—a kick in the groin, an attack from an animal, a fall from a horse—as suitably plausible explanations for the credulous.

平心而论，梵蒂冈不能为这一可悲的传统承担全部责任。观众需求和经济利益或许发挥了更大的作用，而且我们看到，即使在女性歌剧演员被广泛接受之后，这些因素仍然占据主导地位。然而，罗马教会还有其他独特的方式影响歌剧的发展，这些方式与大众的口味远不相符。在某些情况下，教会试图禁止歌剧，或者至少在大斋期暂停演出。但聪明的歌迷找到了绕过禁令的方法——例如，他们参加不算正式演出的歌剧“公开排练”。当教皇克莱门特十一世实施更严格的控制，并设法在1703年至1709年间叫停罗马的歌剧制作时，清唱剧就成了隐形歌剧，以寓言的名义讲述着充满激情的爱情故事。更早之前，梵蒂冈就曾试图鼓励创作以圣人生平为主题的歌剧，罗马的歌剧作品包括《圣阿莱西奥》（1632年）、《圣狄狄摩与特奥多拉》（1635年）、《圣博尼法提奥》（1638年）和《圣尤斯塔基奥》（1643年）。教会内部，尤其是耶稣会，对音乐和戏剧作品寄予厚望，希望将其作为传播信仰的工具，我们甚至听说过修道院里也上演歌剧。

In all fairness, the Vatican cannot assume total responsibility for this lamentable tradition. Audience demand and economic interests may have played an even greater role, and we see that these factors continued to hold sway even after female opera singers were widely accepted. Yet the Church of Rome had other ways of influencing the evolution of opera that were uniquely its own, and far less aligned with popular tastes. In some instances, the church tried to ban operas or at least impose a moratorium on performances during Lent. But ingenious fans found ways around the prohibition—for example, they attended “open rehearsals” of operas that didn’t count as actual performances. When Pope Clement XI imposed stricter controls, and managed to halt opera productions in Rome from 1703 to 1709, oratorios served as stealth operas, presenting passionate love stories in the guise of edifying allegories. Even earlier, the Vatican had tried to encourage operas about the lives of saints, resulting in Roman productions of Il Sant’ Alessio (1632), Santi Didimo e Teodora (1635), San Bonifatio (1638), and Sant’Eustachio (1643). Many within the church, and especially among the Jesuit order, had high hopes for musical and theatrical productions as a tool in propagating the faith, and we even hear of opera performances in monasteries.

1667年，朱利奥·罗斯皮格里奥西被选为教皇克莱门特九世，这似乎预示着教会的精神追求与歌剧美学演变之间和谐共存的新时代。这位未来的教皇年轻时就为上述神圣歌剧撰写了剧本，甚至凭借其对《Chi soffre, speri》（1637年）的贡献，推动了喜歌剧的诞生。罗斯皮格里奥西雄心勃勃，要将罗马教会打造成音乐剧的领军人物。当选教皇后，他授权在罗马建造第一座歌剧院，并计划利用西斯廷教堂唱诗班作为其宗教戏剧理念的平台。但克莱门特九世在位不到一年半后于1669年去世。他的继任者对歌剧持有不同看法，他们缺乏同情心，有时甚至公开充满敌意。歌剧作为基督教教义启迪之源的梦想，即使在最有利的环境下也很可能落空——除非出现一位天才作曲家，软化其说教的棱角，就像弥尔顿或但丁运用诗歌媒介那样。克莱门特去世后，即使是最渺茫的和解希望也破灭了。

The selection of Giulio Rospigliosi as Pope Clement IX in 1667 seemed to signal a new age of harmony between the spiritual aspirations of the church and the aesthetic evolution of opera. As a young man, the future pontiff had written the libretti for the sacred operas mentioned above, and had even helped invent the comic opera with his contributions to Chi soffre, speri (1637). Rospigliosi had ambitious schemes for turning the Church of Rome into a champion of musical theater. After his election as pope, he authorized the construction of the first opera house in Rome, and hatched plans to employ the Sistine Chapel Choir as a platform for his religious theatrical concepts. But Clement IX died in 1669, after serving for less than a year and a half. His successors had different views of opera, less sympathetic and sometimes overtly hostile. The dream of opera as a source of edifying Christian doctrine would probably have failed even under the most favorable circumstances—unless, perhaps, a composer of genius had arisen to soften its didactic edges, the way a Milton or Dante could do in the medium of poetry. After Clement’s death, even the dimmest hopes of such a rapprochement faded away.

此时，文化战争的中心已经向北转移。始于1517年马丁·路德《九十五条论纲》的宗教改革，也引发了真正的军事战争——冲突直到1648年《威斯特伐利亚和约》缔结才得以平息。在这些因基督教世界观冲突而产生的战争中，至少有五百万人丧生，一些专家认为实际死亡人数是这个数字的两倍多。但军事交战难以解决彼此之间在信仰、行为和文化方面互不相容的观念。对艺术和音乐的不同态度或许并非导致这种分裂的主要原因，但它们加剧了分歧，并明确了新教和天主教之间以及改革运动不同分支内部的重要态度差异。罗马教会的批评者宣称，他们已经屈服于艺术的诱惑，并鼓励信徒们将他们的虔诚奉献给上帝的雕像、圣人的画像以及隐藏着神圣话语含义的复杂乐句。新教内部，宗教领袖们对抵制这些过度行为所需的净化程度持有不同看法，但所有人都一致认为，这些古老的习俗需要审查，在某些情况下，甚至需要暴力根除。

The epicenter of the culture wars had already shifted northward by this point. The Reformation, initiated with the promulgation of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, spurred actual military wars as well—the conflicts didn’t subside until the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. At least five million people died in the course of these battles over competing Christian worldviews, and some experts would put the number at more than twice that level. But military engagements could hardly resolve the incompatible visions of creed, conduct, and culture at stake. Conflicting attitudes toward art and music may not have been the dominant causes of this rupture, but they contributed to the disagreements and served to define important attitudinal differences, both between Protestantism and Catholicism and within the different branches of the reform movement. The Church of Rome had succumbed to the allure of art, its critics proclaimed, and encouraged the faithful to offer their devotion to the graven image of God, the painted visage of a saint, and elaborate musical phrases that hid the meaning of the sacred word. Within Protestantism, religious leaders held differing views on the degree of purification necessary to counter these excesses, but all agreed that the old practices required scrutiny and, in some instances, violent eradication.

几乎两千年来所有关于音乐的争议，都作为这场改革的一部分被重新提起。读到这里的读者或许会感到沮丧，因为这些过去的争议几乎都没有得到解决。所有那些曾引起柏拉图、塞涅卡、奥古斯丁和其他理性长老们怀疑的问题，如今在宗教改革的背景下再次出现。音乐的乐趣是否削弱了我们的道德品质？沉迷于庸俗的舞曲是否玷污了启迪心灵的话语？听众们是否能理解这些歌词？当神圣的经文与复杂的旋律结合在一起时，会发生什么？某些乐器是否会带来特殊的风险——或者所有乐器都存在这种风险？在最好的情况下，音乐难道不只是浪费时间和金钱吗？甚至那些将音乐与危险的女性气质联系起来的古老指控也被改革者们重新提起。苏黎世改革家乌尔里希·茨温格利在抨击天主教习俗时问道：“如果一位旧约先知在我们这个时代，在圣殿里看到如此多不同类型的音乐，听到如此多不同的节奏……而那些女性化的教士却穿着丝绸法衣走向祭坛，他会作何反应？真的，他会大声疾呼，让全世界都无法忍受他的话语。” ⁹

Almost every issue of musical controversy from the preceding two thousand years was resurrected as part of this reform. Readers who have traveled with me this far will perhaps be dismayed to learn that virtually none of these past disputes had been resolved. All the same concerns that had aroused the suspicions of Plato, Seneca, Augustine, and other sober elders now returned in the context of the Reformation. Did the pleasure of music weaken our moral fiber? Were edifying words besmirched by getting attached to vulgar dance songs? Could listeners even understand the words when sacred texts were married to elaborate melodies? Did certain instruments pose a special risk—or perhaps all instruments? Under the best case, didn’t music represent an unnecessary waste of time and money? Even the old accusations linking music to dangerous effeminacy got recycled by the reformers. In his attack on Catholic practices, Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli asked how an Old Testament prophet would react “in our times, if he saw so many different kinds of music in the temples, and heard so many different rhythms… while the effeminate canons went to the altar in their silk surplices? Truly, he would cry out so that the whole world could not endure his word.”⁹

茨温格利是一个极端的例子。在他的影响下，教堂的管风琴被出售、损坏或摧毁。在改革的狂热浪潮中，管风琴被戏称为“魔鬼的风笛”——或“教皇的风笛”——有时管风琴师甚至被诽谤为教众的诱惑者。关于苏黎世大教堂（最初由查理曼大帝委托建造）的管风琴师，流传着一个故事，他目睹了当时最伟大的乐器之一被毁后，“无助地站在一旁哭泣”。情况变得如此糟糕，以至于在1525年，苏黎世的所有教堂音乐都被取缔。一种严肃的仪式取代了弥撒，绘画和色彩鲜艳的祭服被搁置一旁，信徒们被告知要专注于布道中富有教化意义的话语^。10

Zwingli was an extreme case. Under his influence, church organs were sold, damaged, or destroyed. In the fervor for reform, the organ got dubbed as “the Devil’s bagpipe”—or “the pope’s bagpipe”—and sometimes the organist was vilified as a seducer of the flock. A story has survived about the organist of the Grossmünster, the Zurich cathedral originally commissioned by Charlemagne, who “stood by, helpless and weeping,” after witnessing the destruction of one of the great instruments of its day. Things got so bad that, in 1525, all church music was eliminated in Zurich. An austere ritual replaced the mass, with paintings and colorful vestments put aside, and congregants told to focus instead on the edifying words of the sermon.¹⁰

然而，茨温格利本人是一位才华横溢的音乐家，在这方面的技艺比其他任何一位重要的改革家都更胜一筹。他的同代人之一伯恩哈德·维斯声称茨温格利能演奏十多种乐器，“以及任何后来发明的乐器”。茨温格利竭力将音乐从信徒的精神生活中根除，但他同时也是一位才华横溢的作曲家。在他去世前不久，他甚至为一部用原文演绎的希腊喜剧首次现代演出谱曲。乍一看，这位瑞士改革家的这两个方面似乎水火不容，但我们也见过其他类似的例子。流行情歌作曲家阿贝拉尔晚年拒绝了对他这一成就的所有赞誉，并立志于一种严肃的宗教信仰。同样，关于他福尔凯·德·马塞利亚年轻时被誉为吟游诗人，他讲述了自己如何引诱歌曲中歌颂的贵妇的故事。后来，作为图卢兹的主教，他因屠杀异教徒和在法国南部支持宗教裁判所而声名鹊起。这些例子提醒我们，即使宗教未能实现其改革歌曲的雄心壮志，它仍然常常能够获得一些意想不到的盟友的支持，其中包括那些年轻时精通这些罪恶风格的音乐家^。11

Yet Zwingli himself was an exceptionally gifted musician, with more demonstrated skill in this field than any of the other major reformers. One of his contemporaries, Bernhard Wyss, claimed that Zwingli could play more than ten instruments, “and anything else that would be invented.” Zwingli, who worked so vigilantly to eradicate music from the spiritual lives of the faithful, also was a talented composer. Shortly before his death, he even wrote the music for the first modern performance of a Greek comedy in the original language. At first glance, these two facets of the Swiss reformer seem irreconcilable, yet we have seen other comparable instances. Abélard, the composer of popular love songs, rejected all acclaim for this achievement later in life and aspired to a dour religiosity. By the same token, a traditional (and perhaps unreliable) account of Folquet de Marselha, acclaimed as a troubadour in his youth, tells of him seducing the noblewomen celebrated in his songs, but later, as bishop of Toulouse, he earned even greater fame for shedding the blood of heretics and championing the Inquisition in the south of France. Such examples remind us that, even when religion falls short in its ambitions to reform song, it still often manages to enlist the support of some unlikely allies along the way, including the same musicians who had mastered these sinful styles in their youth.¹¹

即使在现代，这种转变也时有发生。令人惊讶的是，二十世纪初许多顶尖的布鲁斯演奏家后来都放弃了他们年轻时的音乐。1963年，布鲁斯研究者盖尔·迪恩·沃德洛找到曾在20世纪20年代录制过激情布鲁斯歌曲的伊什蒙·布雷西牧师时，这位牧师表达了“对布鲁斯和布鲁斯生活极度愧疚，近乎偏执”。当一份可能的唱片合约被摆在布雷西面前时，布雷西坚称他只会演奏宗教音乐——从而毁掉了一次原本可能利润丰厚的复出之路。大约在同一时期，罗伯特·威尔金斯牧师重启了他1936年放弃的布鲁斯事业，但在重返舞台之前，他对自己的作品进行了整理，使其更加虔诚。相比之下，曾在20世纪30年代担任传奇布鲁斯吉他手罗伯特·约翰逊导师的桑·豪斯，在大约30年后同意再次演奏古老的布鲁斯音乐，但却对此表现出真正的痛苦，经常在夜总会和咖啡馆的演出中陷入充满激情的说教。约翰逊本人又如何呢？他如今已成为标志性的歌曲中充满了同样的精神焦虑——谁知道如果他活得更久，他会做什么呢？还有一些表演者，如盲人威利·约翰逊和加里·戴维斯牧师，他们推崇布鲁斯的技巧，但将其用于拯救灵魂。或许其中最令人惊奇的转变是汤姆·多尔西从著名的肮脏布鲁斯歌手转变为现代福音音乐的发明者^。12

Even in modern times these turnabouts take place. A surprising number of the leading blues performers of the early twentieth century later renounced the music of their youth. In 1963, when blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow tracked down Reverend Ishmon Bracey, who had recorded lusty blues songs in the 1920s, the preacher expressed “terrible guilt about the blues and the blues life. He was almost paranoid about it.” When a possible recording contract was dangled as a lure, Bracey insisted that he would only perform religious music—thus torpedoing a potentially lucrative comeback. Around this same time, Reverend Robert Wilkins resurrected a blues career he had left behind back in 1936, but he cleaned up his repertoire to make it more godly before returning to the stage. In contrast, Son House, who had served as mentor to the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson back in the 1930s, agreed to play the old blues again some thirty years later, but demonstrated genuine anguish about it, often lapsing into passionate sermonizing during his nightclub and coffeehouse performances. And what about Johnson himself, who filled his now iconic songs with spiritual anxieties of the same sort—who knows what he would have done if he had lived longer? Still other performers, such as Blind Willie Johnson and Reverend Gary Davis, championed the techniques of the blues, but channeled them into saving souls. Perhaps the most amazing turnabout of them all found Tom Dorsey evolving from renowned singer of dirty blues to the inventor of modern gospel music.¹²

如果我们要寻找这些反复无常的原因，或许最简单的解释就能令人信服。音乐家比任何人都更了解歌曲的力量——他们体验过这种力量。他们亲身参与表演，见证自己对观众产生的令人着迷的效果。任何形式的皈依经历或意识形态的转变都会使他们比其他人更热衷于清除主流音乐文化中的危险元素，这合情合理。这种情况与戒酒者成为戒酒最积极的倡导者并无太大区别。或者我想到我的父亲，他的烟瘾缩短了他的寿命，想象一下，除了吸烟之外，他会如何原谅我几乎所有的违规行为。看到他的孩子拿着一包万宝路，他会哭的。那些对任何行为最了解的人往往是最警惕地与之抗争的人。

If we are seeking reasons for these flip-flops, perhaps the simplest one offers the most convincing explanation. Musicians understand better than anyone the power of song—they experience it firsthand in the act of performance, where they witness the mesmerizing effect they have on an audience. It makes sense that any sort of conversion experience or shift in ideology would make them more zealous than others in extirpating dangerous elements in the prevailing musical culture. The situation isn’t much different from reformed drinkers who become the most vocal advocates of abstinence. Or I think of my father, whose addiction to tobacco shortened his life, and imagine how he would have responded to almost any infraction by me with forgiveness except smoking cigarettes. He would have wept to see a child of his with a pack of Marlboros. Those who know any practice most intimately are often the most vigilant in combating it.

马丁·路德也是一位音乐家和作曲家。尽管他反对极端改革派的高压手段，但他也深谙歌曲对人性弱点的深刻影响。天主教音乐史学家费利斯·雷诺迪甚至称路德为“自奥古斯丁以来西方教会最伟大的音乐作家”。路德自信地宣称“信道是从听道来的”——这一信条源自保罗致罗马人书——并且“眼睛看到的奇迹远不如耳朵听到的奇迹”。在当时，路德的大部分时间都提倡宽容，而他那些爱管闲事的同时代人可能会摧毁大部分现有的音乐生态系统。他是一位技艺精湛的歌手，创作了自己的赞美诗，同时也鼓励其他人也这样做。路德也欢迎改编流行旋律和天主教作品，并用与改革神学相符的新文本进行更新。其他人质疑的传统，包括复音音乐，甚至拉丁文本的使用，在他的指导下得以延续。他对当时音乐实践的影响显而易见，但我们也应该思考，他的行为可能如何影响了西方音乐的后期演变。在他去世后的三个世纪里，德国主导了西方世界的音乐文化，并树立了许多人认为从未被超越的卓越标准。如果在16世纪初，一位更严厉的改革者为德国音乐生活制定规则，这种情况几乎不可能发生。我们难道不应该给予马丁路德是否应该为后来的创作复兴赢得更多赞誉，从而产生巴赫、贝多芬、勃拉姆斯以及许多其他受人尊敬的音乐厅音乐大师？¹³

Martin Luther was also a musician and composer, and though he rejected the more repressive measures of the extreme reformers, he, too, grasped the deep power of song on weak human nature. Catholic music historian Felice Rainoldi has gone so far as to proclaim Luther “the greatest writer on music in the Western church since Augustine himself.” Luther confidently proclaimed that “faith comes from hearing”—a tenet drawn from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans—and that “miracles for the eyes are far inferior to those for the ears.” For the most part, Luther advocated tolerance in an environment where his more meddlesome contemporaries would have destroyed most of the existing music ecosystem. He was a skilled singer and composed his own hymns, while encouraging others to do so as well. Luther also welcomed the adaptation of popular melodies and Catholic works, updated with new texts congruent with the reformed theology. Traditions others viewed with suspicion, including polyphony and even the use of Latin texts, continued under his guidance. His influence on the practices of his time is obvious, yet we also do well to ask how his actions may have influenced the later evolution of Western music. During the three centuries following his death, Germany dominated the musical culture of the Western world and set a standard of excellence that many believe has never been surpassed. This could hardly have happened if a more severe reformer had set the rules for German musical life in the early sixteenth century. Shouldn’t we give Martin Luther a little more credit for the later creative resurgence that produced Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and so many other revered masters of concert hall music?¹³

同样，我们或许应该感谢亨利八世国王和他的女儿们，在英国脱离罗马帝国并建立英国国教后，她们温和地推行了音乐改革。亨利八世亲自创作歌曲，包括著名的《欢乐合唱曲》（Pastyme with Good Companye），其喧闹的歌词颂扬着节日和欢乐。亨利八世夺取修道院和其他教会财产，有时甚至导致重要的音乐手稿被毁，但唱诗班仍在大教堂、各学院以及包括温莎城堡在内的皇家场所演出。许多杰出的作曲家开始用英语创作圣乐，但拉丁语在某些情况下也得以保留。1553年，亨利第一次婚姻中唯一在世的孩子玛丽一世加冕后，天主教的礼拜仪式和音乐活动得以复兴。甚至复杂的复音音乐也重新流行起来。五年后，玛丽去世，她的同父异母姐姐伊丽莎白一世女王重建了英国国教的权威。在大多数情况下，伊丽莎白对音乐改革持温和立场，限制那些在文化战争中寻求更极端措施的人。像她的父亲一样，伊丽莎白女王对自己的音乐成就感到自豪。她最喜欢的乐器——太合适了！——是维金纳琴，它是羽管键琴的亲戚（是的，它的名字来源于天真的年轻女子演奏它），有一则轶事讲述了她在键盘演奏方面超越苏格兰玛丽女王时的喜悦之情。在 1559 年的伊丽莎白一世禁令中，她为使用赞美诗和其他歌曲辩护，而不是使用更狂热的改革者所青睐的严肃的圣歌，并明确提到它们在“安慰诸如音乐之乐”方面的合法性。承认教堂音乐应该为教区居民的聆听乐趣做出贡献似乎是一件小事，但在 16 世纪席卷欧洲的更大音乐斗争的背景下，女王的这一宣言是宽容力量的一次重大胜利^。14

By the same token, we should perhaps be grateful to King Henry VIII and his daughters for the mildness with which they introduced musical reforms after Britain broke with Rome and established the Church of England. Henry VIII composed songs himself, including the famous “Pastyme with Good Companye,” with its raucous lyrics celebrating festivities and merry-making. Henry VIII’s seizure of monasteries and other church properties sometimes resulted in the destruction of important musical manuscripts, but choirs continued to perform at cathedrals, at various colleges, and in royal settings, including Windsor Castle. Many leading composers began writing sacred music in English, but Latin also survived in some situations. Catholic liturgical and musical practices were revived after the 1553 coronation of Mary I, the only surviving child of Henry’s first marriage. Even complex polyphony came back into vogue. After Mary’s death five years later, her half sister, Queen Elizabeth I, reestablished the authority of the Church of England. For the most part, Elizabeth took a moderate stance on musical reform, restraining those seeking more extreme measures in the culture wars. Like her father, Queen Elizabeth took pride in her own musical efforts. Her favorite instrument was—so appropriate!—the virginal, a relative of the harpsichord (yes, its name arose because it was played by innocent young women), and an anecdote has survived relating her delight in surpassing Mary, Queen of Scots, as a performer on the keyboard. In the Elizabethan Injunctions from 1559, she defended the use of hymns and other songs beyond the austere psalms favored by more fanatical reformers, explicitly mentioning their legitimacy in the “comforting of such as delight in music.” The admission that church music should contribute to the listening pleasure of parishioners may seem like a small matter, but within the context of the larger battles over music raging through Europe during the course of the sixteenth century, this declaration from the queen was a significant victory for the forces of tolerance.¹⁴

这些文化战争最终以人们所能想象到的最温和的方式得到了和解——既不需要毁坏乐器，也不需要残酷异常的惩罚。北欧和英国各地的新教教会最终成为市场上最大的音乐家雇主。他们没有焚烧管风琴，而是雇佣管风琴师。他们没有禁止复音音乐，而是出资雇佣唱诗班演奏。路德宗和其他教派逐渐发现了天主教徒早已领悟的东西：控制音乐最安全的方式就是雇佣顶尖作曲家。这让我想起了《教父》中唐·科里昂给儿子的那句名言：“亲近你的朋友，但更要亲近你的敌人。”但这或许并不公平。教会领袖们逐渐忘记了他们曾经反对过音乐——至少不是反对过神圣音乐。然而，围绕世俗音乐的文化战争仍将在未来，甚至可能在未来的岁月里持续存在。我怀疑我们是否永远无法摆脱对音乐的争论。我们或许天生就会这样做：研究表明，聆听愉悦的音乐与面对危险时做出“战斗或逃跑”反应之间，神经系统活动（心率、呼吸、体温、脉搏等）之间存在惊人的相关性。这两种选择——狂喜与冲突——一直并存，而且很可能永远如此。然而，音乐的魅力在于，矛盾的是，歌曲也是人类文化中最强大的团队建设和联盟构建力量。音乐或许会引发文化战争，但它也提供了结束战争的工具^。15

These culture wars were eventually reconciled in the gentlest way imaginable—requiring neither the destruction of instruments nor cruel and unusual punishments. The Protestant churches throughout northern Europe and Britain eventually became the largest employers of musicians in the marketplace. Instead of burning organs, they hired organists. Instead of banning polyphony, they paid for it and hired choirs to perform it. Lutherans and other denominations gradually discovered what the Catholics had already learned: that the safest way to control music was to keep the leading composers on the payroll. I am reminded of that famous line from The Godfather, the bit of advice Don Corleone gives his son: “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.” But perhaps that isn’t fair. Church leaders gradually forgot they had ever been opposed to music—at least not sacred music. Yet culture wars over secular music will continue to loom large in the pages ahead, and probably the years ahead as well. I doubt that we will ever get beyond fighting over music. We may be hardwired to do so: research shows striking correlations in nervous system activity (heart rate, respiration, body temperature, pulse, etc.) between listening to pleasurable music and fight-or-flight responses to danger. Those two options, ecstasy and conflict, have always lived in close quarters, and probably always will. Yet the glory of music is that, paradoxically, songs are also the strongest team-building and coalition-building forces in human culture. Music may set off the culture war, but it also provides the tools to end it.¹⁵

展望宗教改革之后，我们会看到，在整个西方世界，音乐家与教会和国家机构之间正处于一段和平共处的时期。或者说，乍一看如此。当时几乎所有杰出的作曲家都与教会和贵族有着经济联系，在许多情况下，他们的整个职业生涯和生计都依赖于这种看似和谐的关系。然而，在表面之下，冲突依然激烈。薪水或许能买到顺从，但并非总能买到满足。伟大的音乐家，或许比其他受雇的音乐家更憎恶对统治权力的奴性。即使在休战期间，他们也认为自己是统治者，尽管他们处于一种不同的领域，但或许与神圣有着同样深厚的联系，甚至可能与神灵直接沟通。在他们的内心，有时甚至通过言语和行动，他们滋养着对不同等级制度的信仰，在这个等级制度中，他们不是仆人，而是主人。鉴于这种世界观的冲突，文化战争无法真正和平结束。他们只是暂时转入地下。

As we look forward beyond the age of Reformation, we see just such a period of peaceful coexistence between musicians and the institutions of church and state throughout the Western world. Or so it seems, at first glance. Virtually every leading composer of the period would have financial ties to church and nobility, and in many instances entire careers and livelihoods depended on this seemingly harmonious relationship. Yet below the surface, conflict still raged. A paycheck may buy compliance, but not always contentment. And great musicians, perhaps even more than others who work for hire, detest servility to ruling powers. Even amidst the truce, they believed they were rulers themselves, albeit in a different domain, but perhaps with just as much a connection to the sacred, maybe even a direct line of communication with the divine. In their hearts, and sometimes with their words and actions, they nurtured a faith in a different hierarchy, one in which they were not servants, but masters. Given this conflict in worldviews, the culture wars couldn’t really come to a peaceful conclusion. They merely went underground for a time.

17

17

戴假发的颠覆分子

Subversives in Wigs

你很难找到比JS·巴赫更受认可、更正统的圈内人士，至少在他通常的形象中是如此。人们将他铭记为一位严肃、戴着假发的路德宗信徒，他为教会权威和贵族服务，为上帝的荣耀奉献了数百首康塔塔、赋格、管弦乐作品和其他作品。然而，现实生活中的巴赫与这个纸上谈兵的人物截然不同。事实上，他提供了一个引人注目的案例，展现了古典音乐史上那些易怒的异见者是如何被后人塑造成墨守成规的权威人物的。

You can hardly find a more sanctioned and orthodox insider than J. S. Bach, at least as he is typically presented. He is commemorated as the sober, bewigged Lutheran who labored for church authorities and nobility, offering up hundreds of cantatas, fugues, orchestral works, and other compositions for the glory of God. Yet the real-life Bach was very different from this cardboard figure. In fact, he provides a striking case study in how prickly dissidents in the history of classical music get transformed into conformist establishment figures by posterity.

“假设我们开始把他看作一个不太可能的反叛者，”指挥家约翰·艾略特·加德纳在他的修正主义研究《巴赫：天堂城堡中的音乐》中提出。音乐学家劳伦斯·德雷福斯在2011年一次充满活力的演讲中，甚至将我们这位冷漠的教堂作曲家称为“颠覆者巴赫”。然而，对于那些胆敢玷污这位杰出人物所享有的体面和礼仪氛围的人来说，他们遭到了巨大的反击。这位文化偶像至今仍是“严肃音乐”的代言人。在2000年巴赫逝世250周年的庆祝活动中，巴赫学者罗伯特·L·马歇尔发出了警告他承认，新信息的出现需要对这位作曲家的生平和作品进行重新解读，但他和他的同行专家“回避了这一挑战，我们也知道这一点”。正如德雷福斯所指出的，目前关于巴赫的许多著作给人的感觉就像是“以圣徒生平为蓝本” ^。1

“Suppose instead we start to view him as an unlikely rebel,” suggests conductor John Eliot Gardiner in his revisionist study Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven. Musicologist Laurence Dreyfus, in a spirited 2011 lecture, even goes so far as to label our stolid church composer “Bach the Subversive.” Yet there is tremendous pushback to those who dare taint the atmosphere of respectability and propriety attached to this towering figure, a cultural icon who remains, even today, the poster boy for “serious music.” Amidst the celebrations linked to the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death in 2000, Bach scholar Robert L. Marshall sounded a cautionary tone when admitting that the availability of new information demands a reinterpretation of the composer’s life and works, but he and his fellow experts were “avoiding this challenge and we knew it.” As Dreyfus has pointed out, much of the current writing on Bach comes across as if it were “modeled on the lives of saints.”¹

我曾与一些自认为非常了解巴赫的人交谈过，但他们并不知道巴赫曾被监禁一个月。他们从未听说过巴赫在街头斗殴中拔刀砍向一位同行音乐家。他们从未听说过他酗酒的恶行——在一次为期两周的旅行中，巴赫向教堂收取啤酒费，而他索要的金额足以购买八加仑啤酒——他们也从未听说过他与萨克森公爵的合同中包含了城堡啤酒厂免税啤酒的条款；他们也从未听说过他被指控在管风琴阁楼与一位身份不明的未婚女子交往；他们也从未听说过他不解释不道歉就无视分配的任务的恶名。他们不知道巴赫的性生活，充其量也只是猜测。但从他已知的二十个孩子（比历史上任何一位重要作曲家都多，如此多的子女甚至让一些人会心一笑地笑说“巴赫的管风琴没有音栓”），以及他三十多岁时与二十岁歌手安娜·玛格达莱娜·维尔克的第二次婚姻，我们该得出什么结论呢？他们不知道巴赫经常引发的纪律问题，不知道他对学生的傲慢，也不知道他用其他许多方式藐视权威。莱比锡的议员们把这个巴赫打上了“不可救药”的标签，他们严厉地记录了这位固执而暴躁的员工犯下的一次又一次罪行。

I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t aware of the time he was imprisoned for a month. They never learned about Bach pulling a knife on a fellow musician during a street fight. They never heard about his drinking exploits—on one two-week trip Bach billed his church for beer, and the amount he demanded was enough to purchase eight gallons—or that his contract with the Duke of Saxony included a provision for tax-free beer from the castle brewery; or that he was accused of consorting with an unknown, unmarried woman in the organ loft; or about his reputation for ignoring assigned duties without explanation or apology. They don’t know about Bach’s sex life, at best a matter of speculation, but what should we conclude from his twenty known children, more than any other significant composer in history (a procreative career that has led some to joke with a knowing wink that “Bach’s organ had no stops”), or his second marriage to a twenty-year-old singer, Anna Magdalena Wilcke, when he was in his late thirties? They don’t know about the constant disciplinary problems Bach caused, or his insolence toward students, or the many other ways he found to flout authority. This is the Bach branded as “incorrigible” by the councilors in Leipzig, who grimly documented offense after offense committed by their stubborn and irascible employee.

但你几乎无需研究巴赫生平的这些事件就能判断他颠覆性的倾向。只需聆听他的音乐，它那浮夸的技巧和大胆的建筑结构必定让许多严谨的路德宗信徒，甚至他的同行音乐家都感到不安。关于他演奏的音乐评论流传下来的不多，但同时代人留下的为数不多的回应，无疑表明了巴赫对其他人所遵循的演奏规则的蔑视。我们听到有人抱怨他在教堂礼拜期间即兴演奏的时间太长。我们读到一位作曲家的愤怒谴责。约翰·阿道夫·沙伊贝（Johann Adolph Scheibe）曾批评巴赫的音乐创作“浮夸”且“混乱”。巴赫甚至被迫在1730年向市议会提交一份备忘录，解释为何有必要拥抱“当下的音乐品味”并“掌握新的音乐类型”。他在备忘录中坚称“以前的音乐风格似乎不再悦耳”，并要求自由追随当时最前卫的潮流。但或许最发人深省的评论来自沙伊贝的抨击，他抱怨巴赫的音乐“被过度的艺术蒙蔽”，并被“无休止的隐喻和比喻”所玷污。换句话说，巴赫在后世所展现的伟大之处，恰恰是他那个时代被怀疑的因素^。2

But you hardly need to study these incidents in Bach’s life to gauge his subversive tendencies. Just listen to his music, which must have disturbed many austere Lutherans, and even fellow musicians, with its ostentatious display of technique and bold architectonic structures. Not much music criticism of his performances has survived, but the few surviving reactions of his contemporaries leave no doubt about Bach’s disdain for the rules by which others played. We hear a complaint about him improvising for too long during church services. We read an angry denunciation from fellow composer Johann Adolph Scheibe about Bach’s “bombastic” and “confused” music-making. Bach was even forced to provide a memorandum to the city council in 1730 explaining why it was necessary to embrace “the present musical taste” and “master the new kinds of music.” Here he insists that “the former style of music no longer seems to please our ears,” and demands the freedom to follow the most progressive trends of his day. But perhaps the most revealing commentary comes from Scheibe’s diatribe, where he complains that Bach’s music was “darkened by an excess of art” and marred by an “unending mass of metaphors and figures.” In other words, the very signs of Bach’s greatness for later generations were the elements that made him suspect during his own time.²

巴赫去世后，这些保留意见依然存在。有人认为，巴赫的作品曾一度被遗忘，直到19世纪20年代末，费利克斯·门德尔松才重新将人们的注意力引向大众。这并不完全正确。在那段时间里，巴赫的音乐仍然受到追捧，但主要是为了教学目的。从这位作曲家身上，我们可以学到太多东西，不能让他的艺术造诣消失。但这并不能免除巴赫所有的过失。巴赫去世后一代作曲家约翰·亚伯拉罕·彼得·舒尔茨抱怨说，他的前辈的众赞歌为那些“宁愿炫耀自己的学识……并大量使用不和谐音进行——这常常使旋律难以辨认——也不愿尊重这种体裁中对于普通人理解至关重要的简洁性”的人开创了一个危险的先例。直到 1800 年，阿贝·格奥尔格·约瑟夫·沃格勒 (Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler) 仍感到有必要通过简化复杂的段落来使巴赫的众赞歌更容易被接受^。3

These reservations continued after Bach’s death. Some have suggested that Bach’s work was forgotten until Felix Mendelssohn helped focus attention on it in the late 1820s. That’s not entirely true. Bach’s music retained a following in those intervening years, but primarily for pedagogical purposes. There was simply too much to learn from this composer to allow his artistry to disappear. But that didn’t absolve Bach of all his transgressions. Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, a composer who came of age in the generation following Bach’s death, complained that his predecessor’s chorales set a dangerous precedent for those who “would rather display their learnedness… and multiply dissonant progressions—which often render the melody quite unrecognizable—than to respect that simplicity which in this genre is so necessary for the understanding of the common people.” As late as 1800, Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler felt compelled to make Bach’s chorales more acceptable by simplifying complex passages.³

当巴赫的天才神话最终浮现时，恰逢德国民族主义情绪高涨和宗教复兴，这些运动希望利用这位早已去世的作曲家来推进自己的议程。甚至不清楚巴赫是否自认为是德国人——而不是撒克逊人或图林根人。然而，到了1802年，传记作家约翰·尼古拉斯·福克尔自豪地宣称：“这位有史以来，甚至可能永远都会存在的最伟大的音乐诗人和最伟大的音乐演说家，是一位德国人。让他的……“国家为他感到骄傲。”这是颠覆性音乐史上常见的循环，在接下来的篇幅中，在不同的情况下（例如布鲁斯吉他手罗伯特·约翰逊或拉格泰姆作曲家斯科特·乔普林）反复出现。这些艺术家在他们自己的时代是丑闻，但在他们留下的遗产被强大的机构挪用并被重新诠释以支持认可的叙事时，他们就成了传奇，但具体日期尚待确定。音乐史学家的作用是将这一平反过程公开化，但对一些人来说，将一个制造麻烦的煽动者的人生故事变成新现状的纪念碑实在太诱人了——甚至是无法抗拒的^。4

When the mythos of Bach’s genius finally emerged, it coincided with a rising sense of German nationalism and a religious revival, movements that hoped to use this now long-dead composer to advance their own agendas. It’s not even clear that Bach self-identified as a German—rather than as a Saxon or a Thuringian. Yet by 1802, a biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, proudly proclaimed, “This man, the greatest musical poet and the greatest music orator that ever existed, and probably ever will exist, was a German. Let his country be proud of him.” This is the familiar recurring cycle in the history of subversive music, revealed repeatedly in the pages ahead in very different circumstances (with blues guitarist Robert Johnson or ragtime composer Scott Joplin, for example). These artists are scandals in their own time, but legends at a to-be-determined later date when their legacies are appropriated by powerful institutions and reinterpreted to support sanctioned narratives. The role of the music historian is to bring this rehabilitative process into the open, but for some it is all too tempting—perhaps even irresistible—to participate in turning the life story of a troublemaking provocateur into a monument to the new status quo.⁴

德雷福斯列举了巴赫颠覆性实践的六个不同方面，这是一份名副其实的反抗宣言。按照他的模式，巴赫颠覆了人们对音乐享受的传统观念——例如，《平均律钢琴曲集》第一卷的 B 小调赋格曲，其主题采用了半音序列的所有十二个音符，挑战了人们对构成美妙旋律的传统观念。他颠覆了将礼拜音乐置于逻各斯（神之道）之下的宗教传统。他颠覆了流行的音乐礼仪观念，这种观念要求表现风格适应场合的具体功能和目的。他颠覆了艺术是自然的镜子，必须遵循自然的表现形式而不是将其自身的自我指涉价值体系强加于艺术作品的教条。他颠覆了音乐创作的传统韵律，即那些引入和发展旋律理念的历史悠久的技巧。最后，他颠覆了人们对音乐虔诚的期待，这种期待要求艺术作品应该以虔诚而有序的敬意来表达对上帝之威严的崇敬，而不是对作品本身或作曲家的荣耀的崇敬。一位想要维护巴赫作为受人尊敬的典范和权威代言人的声誉的圣徒传记作者，可能会对其中一个或多个说法提出异议，但对这位开创性人物、他的生平和作品进行广泛而开放的审视，却无法忽视其整体性。在深层次上，巴赫不信任官员和权力掮客，这体现了每当需要时，他都会展现出他的独立性——有时，当他的缪斯女神要求他这么做时，他也会强行让自己独立。如果他最终成为现状的象征，那只是因为现状适应了他的特权，而不是相反。

Dreyfus specifies six different aspects of Bach’s subversive practices, a veritable manifesto of resistance. According to his schema, Bach subverted conventional notions of musical pleasure—take, for example, the Fugue in B minor in Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, whose theme employs all twelve notes of the chromatic sequence, defying traditional notions of what constituted a beautiful melody. He subverted religious conventions that made liturgical music subservient to logos, the divine word. He subverted prevalent notions of musical propriety, which demanded that expressive style adapt itself to the specific functions and purposes of the occasion. He subverted the dogma that art was a mirror to nature, and must adhere to natural forms of expression rather than impose its own self-referential value system onto artistic works. He subverted the traditional metrics of musical invention, those time-honored techniques by which melodic ideas were introduced and developed. Finally, he subverted the expectations of musical piety, which demanded that a work of art should express its devotion in reverent and orderly subservience to the grandeur of God, and not the glory of the composition or its composer. A hagiographer who wants to maintain Bach’s reputation as a paragon of respectability and poster boy for the establishment could bicker about one or more of these claims, yet it is impossible to dismiss the gestalt that emerges from a broad-based and open-minded survey of this seminal figure, his life story, and his body of work. At a very deep level, Bach distrusted officials and power brokers, demonstrating his independence whenever the occasion arose—and sometimes forced the occasion when his muse so demanded. If he eventually became symbolic of the status quo, it was only because the status quo came to adapt to his prerogatives, not the other way around.

巴赫1750年去世后的一个世纪，传统的音乐史论述侧重于交响曲、弦乐四重奏、协奏曲、奏鸣曲以及其他快速发展的创造性表达平台中技法的惊人扩展。值得注意的是，这些正式的音乐结构与宗教活动几乎没有什么关联——考虑到同一时期教会为欧洲音乐提供了多少资金，这真是一个奇怪的现象。即使是路德宗音乐的伟大倡导者巴赫，如今也因其世俗作品而被人们铭记——如果你对此表示怀疑，只需看看他如今在排行榜上的“畅销作品”就知道了。他的键盘音乐比他的康塔塔点击量更高。他的《受难曲》和《B小调弥撒》都是宗教音乐的杰作，但它们的听众是否比勃兰登堡协奏曲（虽然在巴赫生前鲜为人知，但在“开车时间广播”上反复播放）或他的大提琴组曲（如今已成为弦乐演奏者练习室的必备曲目）更频繁？巴赫去世后，音乐文化的世俗化变得更加明显。查尔斯·罗森在其开创性研究《古典风格》的修订版中指出，批评家们对他对那个时代的教会音乐关注不足表示敌意。但罗森又能如何呢？他解释说，“假装宗教文本的背景在18世纪最后25年没有出现非常激进的风格问题和意识形态问题是不符合历史的……当海顿创作他的大部分弥撒曲时，这种风格已经消亡了。”这里的奇怪之处不在于音乐风格的转变。在教会联系松动、世俗音乐蓬勃发展的时代，这是不可避免的。当我们考虑到这一切发生在几乎每一位主要作曲家都想方设法从宗教机构获取资金的时期时，真正的分歧就出现了^。5

Conventional accounts of music history during the century following Bach’s death in 1750 focus on a dazzling expansion of techniques put to use in symphonies, string quartets, concertos, sonatas, and other rapidly evolving platforms for creative expression. It’s worth noting that none of these formal structures have much to do with religious practices—a peculiar state of affairs when one considers how much churches were covering the cost of European music during this same period. Even Bach, the great exponent of Lutheran music, is best remembered nowadays for his secular works—just check out his current-day ‘best sellers’ on the charts if you doubt it. His keyboard music gets more clicks than his cantatas. His Passions and the Mass in B minor are masterworks of sacred music, but are they heard more often than the Brandenburg Concertos, which, though little known during Bach’s lifetime, are played over and over on “drive-time radio,” or his cello suites, now practice-room staples for string players? After Bach’s death, the secularization of musical culture became even more pronounced. Charles Rosen, in the revised edition of his seminal study The Classical Style, notes the hostility from his critics for his scant attention to the church music of the era. But how could Rosen do otherwise? It is, he explains, “unhistorical to pretend that the setting of religious texts did not present very radical stylistic problems in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and ideological problems as well.… [T]hat style was stone dead when Haydn wrote most of his masses.” The oddity here isn’t the shift in musical styles. That was inevitable in an age of loosening church ties and thriving secular music. The real disjunction comes when we consider how all this happened during a period when virtually every major composer found some way to extract money from religious institutions.⁵

十八世纪的作曲家们学会了过双重生活，为了获得教会的青睐和市场的成功，他们采取截然不同的姿态。维瓦尔第被任命为神父，但大约有一年的时间，他主持了圣礼。他通过教学、作曲和出版找到​​了其他谋生方式。他最著名的作品《四季》与其说是基督教作品，不如说是异教作品，让人想起古代的生育音乐——你会记得，这部作品颂扬的是一位在冬天死去、在春天复活的神。亨德尔的音乐生涯始于一名教堂管风琴师，但很快转向了更有利可图、更令人兴奋的歌剧领域。当他晚年带着《弥赛亚》重返宗教音乐时，它的设计目的是在剧院而不是教堂演出。亨德尔可能在乐谱的结尾写了Soli Deo Gloria（唯有荣耀归于上帝），但他的行为反映出他对市场更大的信任，相信市场会给予他的作品适当的价值。

Composers learned to lead double lives during the eighteenth century, adopting very different postures to secure church favors and marketplace success. Vivaldi was ordained as a priest, but only administered the sacraments for around one year. He found other ways of supporting himself in teaching, composing, and publishing. His most famous work, The Four Seasons, is more pagan than Christian, evocative of the fertility music of antiquity—which, you will recall, celebrated a deity dying in winter and rising in spring. Handel started out his music career as a church organist, but soon moved on to the more lucrative and exciting field of opera. When he returned to religious music late in life with the Messiah, it was designed for performance in theaters, not churches. Handel may have written Soli Deo Gloria (To God alone the glory) at the end of his score, but his actions reflect a greater trust in the marketplace to put a proper value on his work.

总体趋势很明显。这一时期的伟大作曲家越来越多地寻求在宗教管辖之外取得成功的途径，尽管大多数音乐家仍然在教堂内开始他们的职业生涯。以约瑟夫·海顿为例，他在维也纳担任唱诗班男孩时初尝赞誉。这位未来的作曲家本可以从事歌唱事业，并可能同意为了保持年轻的嗓音而接受阉割，但他的父亲否决了这项计划。不久之后，海顿被迫离开大教堂唱诗班，在租来的阁楼里找了个地方，在那里他勤奋学习音乐理论，练习卡尔·菲利普·埃马努埃尔·巴赫（J.S. 巴赫的儿子）的键盘奏鸣曲，后者的作品成为他发展自己作曲技巧的榜样。海顿在埃斯特哈齐家族的职位可能是Kapellmeister，但我们不应该将其翻译为“教堂负责人”——他更像是一位音乐总监，而不是教堂职员。事实上，海顿从未放弃宗教音乐，尽管罗森有所保留，他甚至能够创作出一部诠释圣经的杰作《创世纪》。但与亨德尔一样，海顿创作这部清唱剧是为了音乐会上的付费观众，而不是教堂里虔诚的教区居民。总的来说，宗教音乐只占他作品的一小部分。即使他拥抱宗教音乐，他创作的也不仅仅是为了上帝，也是为了玛门。

The overall trend is clear. The great composers of this period increasingly looked for ways to prosper outside the jurisdictions of religion, even though most musicians still started their careers inside churches. Consider the example of Joseph Haydn, who enjoyed his first taste of acclaim as a choirboy in Vienna. The future composer could have pursued a singing career, and might have agreed to the castration required to maintain his youthful voice, but his father vetoed the plan. Soon after, Haydn was forced to leave the cathedral choir and found a place in a rented attic, where he diligently studied music theory and practiced the keyboard sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach—a son of J. S. Bach—whose work served as a role model as he developed his own skills as a composer. Haydn’s job title with the Esterházy family might have been Kapellmeister, but we would be wrong to translate that as “chapel master”—he was more a musical director than a church functionary. In truth, Haydn never abandoned religious music, and despite Rosen’s reservations, he was even capable of creating a masterpiece of biblical interpretation in The Creation. But like Handel, Haydn wrote this oratorio for paying audiences in concert settings, not devout parishioners at church. Religious music, in aggregate, represents only a small portion of his oeuvre. And even when he embraced it, he did it as much for Mammon as for God.

到十八世纪末，市场已经成为音乐领域成功的主要裁决者，但在此之前，作曲家的职业发展主要依靠两种选择：宗教机构或私人赞助。然而，这两种选择之间的界限往往很模糊。有时教会官员也是富有的贵族——例如莫扎特的赞助人希罗尼米斯·科洛雷多，他的头衔是萨尔茨堡大主教。在其他情况下，作曲家可能受雇于贵族，但被要求为宗教目的创作音乐。巴赫的许多最优秀的康塔塔都是在他为威廉·恩斯特公爵工作期间创作的。另一方面，当巴赫为安哈尔特-克滕王子利奥波德服务时，他可以将大部分时间投入到世俗音乐中。在莱比锡，巴赫专注于宗教作品，但他的雇主是市议会。具体情况各不相同，但几乎所有这些职业选择都基于一种日益过时的观念，即音乐家是社会上层人士的仆人。

By the close of the eighteenth century, the marketplace had emerged as the leading arbiter of success in the field of music, but until that time composers relied primarily on two options for career advancement: religious institutions or private patronage. Yet the dividing line between these two alternatives was often blurred. Sometimes a church functionary was also a wealthy noble—for example, Mozart’s patron Hieronymus Colloredo, whose title was Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. In other instances, a composer might be hired by nobility but requested to write music for sacred purposes. Many of Bach’s finest cantatas were composed while he was working for Duke Wilhelm Ernst. On the other hand, when Bach served Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, he could devote most of his time to secular music. In Leipzig, Bach focused on sacred works, but his employer was the city council. The specific circumstances varied, but almost every one of these career options was based on an increasingly antiquated notion that the musician was a servant to those higher up in the social hierarchy.

这是一种尴尬的局面。安托万·利尔蒂在其研究《名人的发明》中告诉我们，名人的概念“出现于 18 世纪”，而当时作曲家们仍在这种半封建的制度下活动。当然，在更早的时代也有人庆祝其他类型的名声，但根据利尔蒂的实用图式，这些原始类型的声名狼藉要么基于荣耀（令人惊叹的事迹——英勇的壮举或英雄主义之类），要么基于声望（非凡的成就，包括艺术或文学作品）。名人则有所不同，它是一种拥有自身生命的名声，远远超出了对作品和事迹的冷静评价，甚至会让公众对“明星”人物琐碎的私人活动产生痴迷的迷恋。我们倾向于将名人文化视为我们这个时代的标志性特征，但“名人”一词实际上在1800年左右在英语和法语的书面文本中使用率达到顶峰。在此期间，这个词不仅被更频繁地使用，其含义也发生了巨大的变化。在18世纪上半叶，这个词常常带有负面含义，指的是一种厚颜无耻的自我推销，而有尊严的人会避免这种行为。但大约在1760年或1770年，这个词开始呈现出不同的含义，并开始与那些罕见的人物，以某种方式激发了广大公众的热情和好奇心^。6

This was an awkward state of affairs. Antoine Lilti, in his study The Invention of Celebrity, tells us that the concept of celebrity “appeared during the eighteenth century” at the very time when these composers were still operating in this semifeudal arrangement. Of course, other kinds of fame had been celebrated in earlier eras, but these primitive types of notoriety were based, in Lilti’s useful schema, on either glory (at amazing deeds—feats of bravery or heroism and the like) or renown (for extraordinary achievements, including works of art or literature). Celebrity was something different, a kind of fame that took on a life of its own, going far beyond sober appraisals of works and deeds and generating an obsessive public fascination with even the trivial private activities of the ‘star’ personage. We tend to think of celebrity culture as a defining aspect of our own times, but the word celebrity actually achieved its peak usage in written texts, both in English and French, around the year 1800. Not only did the word get used more frequently, but its meaning shifted dramatically during this period. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the term had often carried negative connotations, referring to a kind of shameless self-promotion that a more dignified person would avoid. But around 1760 or 1770, the word started taking on a different resonance, and was now attached to those rare individuals who somehow inspired the passion and curiosity of the wider public.⁶

约瑟夫·海顿正是在此时受雇成为埃斯特哈齐家族的仆人。这份作曲家合同的日期为1761年5月1日，保存在家族档案中，由此我们可以看出海顿的卑微程度。他必须穿着制服，就像其他侍从和走狗一样。他不得与雇主同吃同喝，但必须与其他仆人一起用餐。他需要避免与埃斯特哈齐家族成员有任何亲密接触或随意交往，并且每天必须两次觐见“殿下”接受命令。似乎这些要求还不够羞辱人心，埃斯特哈齐王子有权决定海顿创作什么音乐，并拥有其作品的版权。为了堵住任何漏洞，合同还禁止海顿未经王子明确许可为任何人作曲。以我们的标准来看，这些条款堪称惩罚性条款，甚至可以说是不合情理的。但这在当时的欧洲音乐界却是最令人向往的职位之一。

This is the same moment when Joseph Haydn got hired as a servant of the Esterházy family. The composer’s contract, dated May 1, 1761, was kept in the family archives, so we can gauge the full degree of Haydn’s servility. He was required to dress in a uniform, much like other attendants and lackeys. He wasn’t allowed to eat or drink with his employers, but was expected to dine with other servants. He needed to avoid familiarity or casual intercourse with the family, and had to appear before “His Highness” twice each day to take orders. As if these requirements weren’t sufficiently humiliating, Prince Esterházy would decide what music Haydn wrote and own the rights to his compositions. To close off any loopholes, the contract also prohibited Haydn from composing music for anyone else without the prince’s explicit permission. By our standards, these terms are punitive, perhaps even unconscionable. Yet this was one of the most desirable positions in European music at the time.

这些封建式的艺术赞助制度在更广阔的世界发生的变化中难以幸免。即使在海顿的有生之年，这种平衡也发生了变化。1789年，作曲家卡尔·迪特斯·冯·迪特斯多夫觐见约瑟夫一世时，神圣罗马帝国的统治者竟然盘问他，比较海顿和莫扎特的优劣。令人惊讶的是，这位权势显赫的统治者竟然承认自己写了一篇评价两位作曲家的文章，并急于将其展示给来访者。如今，统治者们自己也成了他们的粉丝，新一代的音乐名人激起了他们的好奇心。

These feudal trappings of artistic patronage could hardly survive the changes taking place in the wider world. Even within Haydn’s lifetime, the balance would shift. When composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf received a private audience with Joseph I in 1789, he found himself interrogated by the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire about the comparative merits of Haydn and Mozart. In an amazing revelation, this powerful ruler admitted that he had written an essay assessing the virtues of the two composers, and was anxious to show it to his visitor. Rulers were now fans themselves, their own curiosity piqued by the new breed of musical celebrities.

一些有进取心的学者应该对十八世纪作曲家与赞助人之间所使用的语言的变化进行详细的研究。在这里，我们可以以简洁的形式追溯到作曲家乐谱中同样摆脱形式限制的解放。早在1709年，安东尼奥·维瓦尔第就感到有必要向丹麦和挪威国王腓特烈四世献上这首献词：“我非常有信心向您表示我的屈辱，考虑到我微不足道的真实情况，这种屈辱是无可挽回的。” 献给威尼斯贵族维托伟大的作曲家德尔菲诺曾赞叹道：“您的音乐品味如此精湛，没有一位艺术家不渴望得到您的师傅之名。”维瓦尔第对威尼斯的贡巴拉伯爵感慨道：“我不会迷失在您最尊贵、最优秀的家族的辉煌荣耀之中，因为我将一去不复返，因为他们是如此的伟大和众多。”在同一个世纪的末期，我们发现贝多芬在向科隆选帝侯献上的三首奏鸣曲中也使用了同样卑躬屈膝的语言，谦虚地宣称“将我年轻时的第一批作品献给您的宝座”。这些话很可能出自贝多芬的父亲或老师之手；无论如何，作曲家创作这些作品时只有十二岁，他以后再也不会在献词中采用如此自卑的语气了。在这两个极端之间，我们发现了海顿。他对待赞助人的态度在其职业生涯中发生了显著变化。他也能扮演谄媚的奴才角色，尤其是在早年与埃斯特哈齐王子相处时。在1766年写给赞助人的一封信中，海顿表示“我愿意亲吻您的袍子下摆，感谢您慷慨地赠送我们新的冬装”。但这些抗议最终在他与埃斯特哈齐家族的通信中消失了；取而代之的是他吹嘘自己的声望，以及抱怨时间安排过于繁琐：“我的到来引起了巨大的轰动，”他在1791年写信给来自英国的新王子安东·埃斯特哈齐，“迫使我在当天晚上就搬到了更大的住处。我被宾客们挤得水泄不通，几乎无法在六周内回礼。”信的结尾，他平淡地承诺，一旦有时间，他会再次“尽职尽责地汇报”，但至少还要再过一个月。在附言中，他向老板的“迷人妻子”送上了吻，这位 22 岁、比作曲家年轻 36 岁的迷人女子^。7

Some enterprising scholar should conduct a detailed study of the changing language composers used with patrons over the course of the eighteenth century. Here in compact form we can trace the same liberation from formal constraints writ large in the composers’ musical scores. Back in 1709, Antonio Vivaldi felt compelled to offer this dedication to King Frederick IV of Denmark and Norway: “It gives me great confidence to offer you my abasement which in real consideration of my nothingness could not in any way be more diminished.” To Venetian nobleman Vettor Delfino, the great composer gushed: “Your good taste in [music] has reached such a perfection that there is no artist who would not wish for the glory of having you as a master.” To Count Gombara of Venice, Vivaldi effused: “I will not lose myself in the vast expanse of the glories of your most noble and excellent family, for I would not find my way out again, since they are so immense in greatness and number.” At the far end of that same century, we find Beethoven offering similarly servile language in his dedication of three sonatas to the Prince Elector of Cologne, modestly daring “to put my first youthful works at the foot of Your throne.” It’s possible that these words were actually written by Beethoven’s father or his teacher; in any event, the composer was only twelve years old when he wrote those works, and he would never again adopt such a self-abasing tone in future dedications. In between these two extremes, we find Haydn, whose attitude toward his patrons changed markedly over the course of his career. He, too, could play the role of the obsequious flunky, particularly in his early years with Prince Esterházy. In a letter to his patron from 1766, Haydn offered “to kiss the hem of your robe for graciously presenting us with new winter clothes.” But these protestations eventually disappeared from his correspondence with the Esterházy clan; he replaced them with boasts of his popularity and complaints about the demands on his time: “My arrival caused a great sensation,” he wrote to the new prince, Anton Esterházy, from England, in 1791, “and forced me to move on the very same evening to larger quarters. I am so burdened with visitors that I will hardly be able to reciprocate within six weeks.” He closed the letter with a bland promise to “dutifully report” again when he found time, but not for at least another month, and in a postscript he sent kisses to his boss’s “charming wife,” an attractive twenty-two-year-old woman who was thirty-six years younger than the composer.⁷

了解更多关于海顿与女性的关系将会很有趣——并非出于情色的好奇心，而是为了衡量当时对名人的痴迷对音乐家们的日常生活有多大影响。他们的私密时刻与如今音乐厅里的私密时刻有多相似？明星？我们能否在此找到更多证据来支持第一章中强调的音乐技能与性选择优势之间的联系？海顿的遗嘱中充满了对非血缘关系女性的遗赠。这或许仅仅反映了他慷慨大方的性格——但我们或许也能从中发现今天所谓的“追星族”的出现，他们是一群狂热的歌迷，通过短暂的性调情来表达对音乐家的热爱。然而，我们对过去这些关系知之甚少，只能尽力去解读字里行间的含义。即便如此，毫无疑问，海顿亲身经历过名人狂热——1785年的一篇英国报纸文章甚至鼓励他的狂热粉丝（“有抱负的年轻人”）绑架这位受人尊敬的作曲家，以便将他从“一位可怜的德国王子的宫廷”中解救出来^。8

It would be interesting to know more about Haydn’s relations with women—not out of salacious curiosity, but to gauge how much the new obsession with celebrities impacted the real day-to-day lives of musicians during the period. How closely did their intimate moments resemble those of current-day concert hall stars? Do we find here further evidence to support linkages, highlighted back in Chapter 1, between musical skill and advantages in sexual selection? Haydn’s last will and testament was filled with bequests to women who were not related to him by blood. Perhaps this merely reflected his generous, charitable nature—but we might also detect the emergence of what we today would refer to as groupies, ardent fans who marked their devotion to musicians via a short-lived sexual dalliance. Yet we know so little about these relationships in past eras, and are forced to read between the lines as best we can. Even so, there can be no doubt that Haydn experienced celebrity mania firsthand—a 1785 British newspaper article even encouraged his enthusiastic fans (“aspiring youths”) to kidnap the esteemed composer in order to liberate him from “the court of a miserable German Prince.”⁸

在莫扎特的私生活中，同样的悬而未决的问题显得尤为突出。我们知道，他创作了最著名的高雅文化作品——歌剧《唐璜》，该剧讲述了勾搭和一夜情的故事。这部歌剧由剧本作家洛伦佐·达·蓬特协助创作，而洛伦佐·达·蓬特现实生活中也是一位花花公子，他从好友（也是臭名昭著的情人）贾科莫·卡萨诺瓦那里直接学到了勾引的技巧。但关于莫扎特自己的感情关系，我们又能肯定些什么呢？诚然，他留下了大量关于私生活的记录，尤其是他现存的大量信件，他的写作粗俗令许多古板的古典音乐崇拜者感到震惊。但这些信件有时与其说是解释，不如说是令人费解，即使它们最终以未经审查的形式呈现给公众（这在20世纪之前很少见），仍然留下了许多猜测。这里展现了一种隐晦的情色，莫扎特频繁的间接表达更是增添了困惑。例如，想想“ spuni cuni fait”（没有学者确切知道该如何翻译）；或者他向玛莎·伊丽莎白·冯·瓦尔德施泰滕男爵夫人暗示，他必须向妻子隐瞒他们交流的某些方面；或者他对表妹的宣言——这句话他换成了法语——说他会亲吻她的手、她的脸、她的膝盖，事实上，他会亲吻“你允许我亲吻的一切”。编辑们留下了最后这一句话莫扎特书信的英文版中没有翻译——这或许是有原因的，因为“baiser”不仅仅表示亲吻，还可以理解为英文词“screwing”（拧紧）。莫扎特本人曾向父亲承认，他比大多数男人更能感受到性欲，这强化了他作为充满激情的情人的形象，就像他创作的舞台剧《唐璜》中的角色一样^。9

The same unanswered questions loom even larger in the case of Mozart’s private life. We do know that he created the most famous work of highbrow culture about hook-ups and one-night stands, the opera Don Giovanni, composed with the assistance of librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, a real-life philanderer who learned seduction skills firsthand from his close friend (and notorious lover) Giacomo Casanova. But what can we say with any certainty about Mozart’s own romantic relationships? True, he left behind ample documentation of his private life, especially in his voluminous surviving correspondence, which he wrote with a crudity that has alarmed many prim admirers of classical music. But these missives are sometimes more mystifying than explanatory, and even after they were finally presented to the public in uncensored form (a rarity until the twentieth century), they left much open to speculation. A kind of coded eroticism is displayed here, and Mozart’s frequent indirect expressions add to the confusion. Consider, for example, the phrase spuni cuni fait (which no scholar is quite sure how to translate); or his hints to Baroness Martha Elisabeth von Waldstätten that he must hide some aspects of their communications from his wife; or his declaration to his cousin, switching into French for this remark, that he will kiss her hands, her face, her knees, and, in fact, “everything you will allow me to kiss.” The editors left this last word untranslated in the English edition of Mozart’s letters—and perhaps with good reason, because baiser doesn’t merely signify kissing but can serve as an equivalent to the English term screwing. Mozart himself admitted to his father that he felt the sex drive more acutely than most men, reinforcing the image of him as a passionate lover much like his stage creation Don Giovanni.⁹

一些评论家根据这些线索，构建了莫扎特的传记，其中充斥着他游历欧洲期间与仆人、歌手和其他女性的风流韵事。然而，莫扎特也有强烈的宗教顾虑，并向父亲声明，他出于荣誉感而避免与父亲发生性关系。我不确定我们是否能相信后一种说法，但即使它是真的，莫扎特需要如此断言，也表明在当时的历史阶段，杰出的音乐家有机会利用他们的名气进行卧室里的出轨。

Some commentators have built on such clues to construct a biography of the composer marked by affairs with servants, singers, and other females in his path during his travels around Europe. Yet Mozart also had strong religious scruples and made protestations to his father that he avoided casual affairs out of a sense of honor. I’m not sure whether we can believe the latter claim, but even if it’s true, Mozart’s need to assert it demonstrates that eminent musicians, at this stage in history, had opportunities to parlay their celebrity into bedroom escapades.

在试图确定那个时代伟大作曲家的作品中的颠覆性政治信息时，我们的立场更加坚定。导演彼得·塞拉斯称莫扎特是“历史上政治意识最强烈的艺术家之一”，并指出“每一部歌剧都是统治阶级和工人阶级之间平等的激进姿态”。以莫扎特与达·蓬特合作的第一部歌剧《费加罗的婚礼》为例，现在许多人认为这部歌剧是富人受人尊敬的高雅娱乐的缩影。然而，当他们决定创作这部歌剧时，作为其基础的皮埃尔·博马舍的戏剧刚刚根据约瑟夫二世皇帝的明确命令在维也纳被禁。甚至更早，路易十六就曾试图禁止该剧在巴黎上演，而该剧首演后引发了一场骚乱，造成三人死亡。当《费加罗的婚礼》以歌剧形式重返舞台时，法国大革命才刚刚过去三年，即使是达蓬特更为谨慎的演绎，也不难将这里对贵族的严厉批评与即将占领巴黎街头的那些批评联系起来^。10

We are on more solid ground when trying to determine the subversive political messages in the works of the great composers of the era. Director Peter Sellars has labeled Mozart “one of the most intensely political artists in history,” pointing out that “every single opera is a radical gesture of equality between the ruling class and the working class.” Take, for example, Mozart’s first opera with Da Ponte, The Marriage of Figaro, now considered by many as the epitome of respectable highbrow entertainment for the affluent. Yet when they decided to write this opera, the Pierre Beaumarchais play that serves as its basis had recently been banned in Vienna on the explicit order of Emperor Joseph II. Even earlier, Louis XVI had tried to prohibit its staging in Paris, and when it did make its debut, a riot ensued, with three fatalities. The French Revolution was only three years in the future when The Marriage of Figaro returned to the stage as an opera, and it isn’t hard to connect the harsh critiques of nobility presented here, even in Da Ponte’s more circumspect rendition, with those that would soon take over the streets in Paris.¹⁰

莫扎特是革命者吗？我觉得我们没法深入探讨。塞拉斯试图用“托词”来解释莫扎特信中为何没有明确的煽动性言论：“你必须记住由于审查制度如此严格，任何表达革命思想或导致法国大革命的思想的人都可能被秘密警察讯问。”但我认为历史学家保罗·约翰逊的说法更接近事实，他说莫扎特的“政治观点虽然谈不上革命，但却是谨慎而又强烈的颠覆性”。他认为，这解释了为什么莫扎特尽管声名显赫，却很少受到统治阶级的青睐。“由于他的政治观点，莫扎特在维也纳陷入了困境。” ¹¹

Was Mozart a revolutionary? I don’t think we can go that far. Sellars tries to explain the absence of explicitly seditious comments in Mozart’s letters as subterfuge: “You have to remember that censorship was so intense, anyone who expressed revolutionary ideas or those that led to the French Revolution would be likely to be interrogated by the secret police.” But I think historian Paul Johnson comes closer to the truth when he declares that Mozart’s “politics, though by no means revolutionary, were discreetly but emphatically subversive.” This, he believes, explains why Mozart received so little patronage from the ruling class despite his renown. “Mozart was left high and dry in Vienna because of his politics.”¹¹

再想想莫扎特 1784 年加入共济会的事。他加入该组织有时被视为一种有趣的业余爱好，或是《魔笛》中象征意义的来源。但这一时期的统治者惧怕秘密社团。1785 年，就在莫扎特入会一年后，约瑟夫二世皇帝限制了共济会分会的数量，并要求地方官员收到最新的会员名册和会议时间。学者们仍在争论共济会是否在四年后的法国大革命中发挥了作用，但毫无疑问，具有更传统倾向的非会员不信任该组织。同样，虽然共济会在 18 世纪古典音乐中扮演的重要作用并不能证明革命意图，但这个秘密社团对海顿和莫扎特的吸引力，让我们可以深入了解他们所属的新一代名人作曲家队伍的个性。作曲家们越来越把自己视为局外人，尽管他们利用与内部人士的联系来获得职业发展。

Consider as well Mozart’s membership in the Freemasons, which he joined in 1784. His involvement in the organization is sometimes seen as a quaint sideline, or as a source of the symbolism in The Magic Flute. But secret societies were feared by rulers during this period. In 1785, just a year after Mozart’s enlistment, Emperor Joseph II restricted the number of Masonic lodges and demanded that magistrates receive updated membership rosters and meeting times. Scholars still debate whether Freemasonry played a role in spurring the French Revolution four years later, but there can be little doubt that nonmembers with more traditional leanings distrusted the organization. By the same token, although the significant role the Masons played in the classical music of the eighteenth century is not proof positive of revolutionary intent, the attraction this secret society held for Haydn and Mozart provides insights into the personalities of the new cadre of celebrity composers of which they were a part. Composers increasingly viewed themselves as outsiders even as they drew on their connections to insiders for career advancement.

事实上，莫扎特有时明确地站在君主制而非革命一边。在美国独立战争期间，他在给父亲的一封信中宣称：“我是一个彻头彻尾的英国人。” 这封信赞扬了英国在那场战争中战胜法国的胜利。但即便如此，我们也必须记住，对当时维也纳的许多人来说，英国代表着一个独立和个人自由的国度。莫扎特对这些问题的看法毋庸置疑——他的一生就是例证——但他的态度或许既关乎个性，也关乎意识形态。莫扎特当然对专横跋扈、墨守成规的人毫无耐心。他所处的时代文化精英的行事方式，这种态度在他的性格和作品中同样清晰地体现出来^。12

In fact, Mozart sometimes explicitly came down on the side of monarchy rather than revolution. During the course of the American Revolution, he declared, in a letter to his father that exulted in the British victories over the French in that conflict, “I am an out-and-out Englishman.” But even here we must recall that England, for many in Vienna at the time, represented a land of independence and personal liberty. There’s no room to doubt Mozart’s views on those matters—his life exemplified them—but his attitudes here might be as much a matter of personality as ideology. Certainly Mozart had little patience for the domineering and hidebound ways of the cultural elites of his day, and this attitude comes across with equal clarity in his character and his compositions.¹²

自从海顿主动亲吻其赞助人长袍下摆以来，二十年间，赞助人与作曲家之间的关系发生了巨大变化。故事讲述了作曲家路易吉·博凯里尼受西班牙皇家赞助人之命，修改其作品中一段乐段，而博凯里尼则将其长度加倍。同一时期，卡尔·菲利普·埃马努埃尔·巴赫撰写了一部自传——在当时音乐家回忆录几乎无人知晓的时代，这对于一位作曲家来说是一项非凡的成就——并借此平台表达了对那些胆敢批评他的人的愤怒。莫扎特在其职业生涯的大部分时间里都是出于生活所需而从事自由职业，但即使得到了赞助人的支持，他也对此颇有微词。在1781年写给父亲的一封信中，莫扎特满口抱怨自己在萨尔茨堡大主教手下的地位，他感叹道：“请问，他究竟给了我什么荣誉？”他鄙视大主教把他当仆人对待，并告诉父亲，这种身份只会掩盖他的才华——这与传统观点相悖，传统观点认为，与富有的赞助人交往可以提升音乐家的地位。海顿或许当时也有同样的感受，但他可能更好地向雇主隐瞒了自己的恼怒。莫扎特则没有那么谨慎，肯定引起了不小的骚动。当他最终被解雇时，大主教的管家狠狠地踢了这位伟大的作曲家一脚，把他赶出了宫殿。莫扎特的反应是：他宣布要回敬这一脚，即使花了二十年时间才找到机会。这就是法国大革命前夕欧洲最伟大的作曲家和他最重要的赞助人之间的关系^。13

Relations between patrons and composers had changed dramatically in the two decades since Haydn had offered to kiss the hem of his patron’s robe. The story is told of composer Luigi Boccherini, ordered by his royal Spanish patron to change a passage in one of his works, responding by making it twice as long. During this same period, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote an autobiography—an extraordinary undertaking for a composer during this period, when musicians’ memoirs were all but unknown—and used this platform to express irritation at those who dared criticize him. Mozart was a freelancer out of necessity for most of his career, but even when he enjoyed the support of a patron he grumbled about it. In a letter to his father from 1781 filled with complaints about his position with the Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart exclaimed: “What distinction, pray, does he confer upon me?” He scorned the archbishop’s treatment of him as a servant, and told his father that this position served only to hide his talent—a reversal of the traditional view that association with a wealthy patron raised a musician’s status. Perhaps Haydn felt the same way around this time, but he probably did a better job of hiding his irritation from his employer. Mozart was not so cautious, and must have caused quite a scene. When he was finally dismissed, the archbishop’s steward threw the great composer out of the palace with a literal kick in the ass. Mozart’s reaction: he declared his intention of returning the kick, even if took twenty years to find an opportunity. Such were the relations between Europe’s greatest composer and his most important patron in the years leading up to the French Revolution.¹³

但我们不能将这种暴躁仅仅归咎于煽动性的政治信仰。莫扎特之所以能如此傲慢，是因为十八世纪末期音乐家们自由职业的机会大大增加。作为自己的老板，莫扎特有五大收入来源。首先，他通过授课赚钱，这与今天的音乐家并无二致。我们无法得知他教学工作的全部内容，但一封1782年的信中写道他向父亲吹嘘他的三个学生带来的收入。其次，他在公开音乐会上演出，有时甚至组织这些活动——负责售票和支付音乐厅的租金。第三，他为贵族成员和其他富有的音乐爱好者举办私人音乐会。出版是第四个收入来源，虽然在今天的版权法下，这项事业的收入不如现在那么多，但随着钢琴在中产阶级家庭的普及以及对印刷乐谱需求的不断增长，出版业的机会也在不断扩大。最后，莫扎特可以依靠作品佣金，尤其是歌剧佣金——但在这里，报酬也是一次性的雇佣工作，没有如今作曲家享有的持续版税收入。

But we can’t attribute this testiness merely to seditious political beliefs. Mozart could afford his arrogance because of the enormous expansion of freelancing opportunities available to musicians in the closing years of the eighteenth century. As his own boss, Mozart had five significant sources of income. First, he made money from giving lessons, no different from musicians today. We don’t know the full extent of his pedagogical work, but a letter from 1782 finds him boasting to his father about the income from three of his students. Second, he performed at public concerts, and sometimes even organized these events—taking charge of selling tickets and covering the rental of the hall. Third, he gave private concerts for members of the nobility and other wealthy music lovers. Publishing provided a fourth source of income, and though this endeavor didn’t bring in as much money as it would with today’s copyright laws, opportunities were constantly expanding with the spread of pianos into middle-class homes and the rising demand for printed music. Finally, Mozart could count on commissions for works, especially operas—but here, too, payments were onetime work-for-hire arrangements without the ongoing royalty income composers enjoy nowadays.

尽管有这些限制，莫扎特仍然赚了不少钱。你有时会听到有人说他生前和死后都一贫如洗，但这完全是胡扯。以当时的标准来看，莫扎特过着中上阶层的生活。他在市中心拥有一套理想的公寓，衣着时尚，需要时会租用马车，并在餐馆用餐。他每天都会花钱请一位理发师来给他梳头、搽粉。来他家做客的人会惊讶地发现一张台球桌，这种东西在贫困家庭里很少见。莫扎特的确有债务问题，但这反映出他挥霍无度的生活方式，而不是缺乏赚钱的机会。而且，如果莫扎特活得更久一些，他很可能已经拥有相当富裕的生活。他的遗孀康斯坦泽·韦伯成功地将他的艺术作品货币化，甚至在没有新作品出售的情况下，这表明即使是已故的作曲家在十九世纪初的市场上也拥有巨大的经济价值。

Despite these limitations, Mozart still made a considerable amount of money. You will sometimes hear allegations that he lived and died in poverty, but nothing could be further from the truth. Mozart enjoyed an upper-middle-class lifestyle by the standards of the time. He had a desirable apartment in the center of the city, dressed in style, hired a coach when needed, and dined in restaurants. He paid for a barber to visit him daily for dressing and powdering his hair. Visitors to his home would be surprised to see a billiard table, a possession rarely associated with the households of the impoverished. True, Mozart had problems with his debts, but that reflected his spendthrift ways, not a lack of earning opportunities. And it is likely that, had he lived longer, Mozart would have enjoyed considerable affluence. The success of his widow, Constanze Weber, in monetizing his artistry, even without the benefit of new works to sell, shows how much economic value even a dead composer possessed in the marketplace after the dawn of the nineteenth century.

但如果我们正在寻找一个象征性的转折点，一个作曲家们摆脱奴性、成为遵循自身规则的名人的时刻，我会提醒大家关注当时发生的一个容易被忽视的事件。即使这些变化是渐进的，有时生态系统的一次转变也能反映出一个此前被隐藏的现实。例如1790 年，一个陌生人敲开了海顿的门，没有预约也没有提前通知，他对这位茫然的宫廷作曲家说：“我是伦敦的所罗门，来接您。明天我们将安排一次协议。”这位出生于德国的演出经理约翰·彼得·所罗门看到了海顿尚未意识到的事情：在伦敦，作曲家将获得多么高的赞誉和收入。与能说流利英语的莫扎特不同，海顿对英语一无所知。但音乐和金钱无需言语就能表达，海顿对金钱非常精通，并且是公认的音乐大师。在伦敦，海顿发现他能赚到在埃斯特哈齐家族的二十倍。现在，他可以为阿谀奉承的观众演出，并能享受大型、训练有素的管弦乐队的帮助。海顿在音乐会之余，还受到威尔士亲王和其他皇室成员的盛情款待，并被授予牛津大学荣誉博士学位。在这样的环境下，他获得了前所未有的灵感。在1794年至1795年期间，海顿首次造访伦敦，并第二次在伦敦创作，创作了许多他最著名的作品，并在五六十岁时达到了音乐史上罕见的创作巅峰^。14

But if we are looking for a symbolic turning point, a moment in music history when composers abandoned servility and turned into celebrities who lived by their own rules, I would call attention to an easy-to-ignore incident that took place around this time. Even when the changes are gradual, sometimes a single shift in the ecosystem reflects a reality previously hidden from view. Such was the moment in 1790 when a stranger knocked on Haydn’s door, without an appointment or advance notice, and declared to the bewildered court composer: “I am Salomon of London and have come to fetch you. Tomorrow we will arrange an accord.” This German-born impresario, Johann Peter Salomon, could see what Haydn had not yet realized: the degree of acclaim and income that awaited the composer in London. Unlike Mozart, who was fluent in English, Haydn lacked even a rudimentary knowledge of that language. But music and money speak eloquently without much need for words, and Haydn was more than conversant with the latter and an acknowledged master of the former. In London, Haydn found that he could earn twenty times as much as he had with the Esterházy family. He now performed for adulatory audiences and with the benefit of large, well-trained orchestras. And when Haydn wasn’t concertizing, he was feted by the Prince of Wales and other members of the royal family, and awarded an honorary doctorate at Oxford. In these circumstances, he was inspired as never before. For this initial visit and his second London stint in 1794–1795, Haydn created many of his most celebrated works, enjoying a creative peak in his late fifties and early sixties seldom matched in the history of music.¹⁴

我是否过多地讨论了社会经济因素？我认为并非如此。十八世纪最后几十年，音乐形式发生了翻天覆地的变化，但如果不充分考虑欧洲顶尖作曲家的社会地位和声誉的变化，我们就无法充分解释这些变化。名人地位模糊了作曲家生平与艺术创作之间的界限，音乐作品的结构基础也必须适应这种新的状态。音乐作品开始呈现出叙事形式，即使是没有明确歌词引导听众的“纯”音乐作品也是如此。“交响曲被迫成为一场戏剧表演，”查尔斯·罗森解释说，“因此，它不仅发展出类似情节的东西，有高潮和结局，而且还发展出一种此前只部分达到的音调、人物和动作的统一。” 越来越多的作品以作曲家生平事件命名。这些作品的作者是谁？海顿的《牛津交响曲》（如今被称为《牛津交响曲》）并非真正为他的牛津之行而作——它实际上是受一位法国伯爵委托创作的，之前曾在巴黎演出过——但观众更愿意将这类作品视为受重大个人事件乃至内心情感波动启发的自传式陈述。即使莫扎特的《安魂曲》并非真正为他自己的死亡而作，他的许多崇拜者也更愿意将其视为这样的作品^。15

Have I dwelt too much on socioeconomic factors here? I think not. Extraordinary changes were taking place in musical forms during the final decades of the eighteenth century, but we can’t adequately account for them without taking full measure of these shifts in the social position and renown of Europe’s leading composers. Celebrity status was blurring the line between a composer’s biography and art, and the structural underpinnings of musical works had to adapt to this new state of things. Musical compositions were taking on a narrative form, even when they were works of ‘pure’ music without an explicit text to guide the listener. “The symphony was forced to become a dramatic performance,” explains Charles Rosen, “and it accordingly developed not only something like a plot, with a climax and a dénouement, but a unity of tone, character and action it had only partially reached before.” Works were increasingly named after events in the lives of the composers who wrote them. Haydn’s “Oxford Symphony,” as it is called today, wasn’t really composed for his Oxford visit—it had actually been commissioned by a French count and performed previously in Paris—but audiences preferred to see such works as autobiographical statements inspired by momentous personal events and perhaps inner emotional turmoil. Even if Mozart’s Requiem wasn’t really composed for his own death, many of his admirers preferred to view it as such.¹⁵

但要让音乐承受如此重压，其方方面面都需要改变。巴洛克音乐那种沉稳流畅的节奏几乎无法传达出极致的戏剧效果；它必须被一种富有表现力的变调、停顿、音峰和音谷变化的节奏景观所取代。动态变化需要更加有力。乐曲中能量的流动需要持续的掌控，甚至是微观的掌控，才能产生出崇高而独特的对比。那些以前看似过于夸张的技巧——不规则的乐句、不连贯的调性转换、出其不意的静默，甚至是喜剧效果——如今都被作曲家们所推崇，并受到观众的追捧。它们只不过是古典音乐半神们所期待的怪癖和奇思妙想的另一种体现。

But for music to bear this weight, every aspect of it needed to change. The poised, extended flow of Baroque music was hardly suitable for conveying extreme dramatic effects; it had to be replaced by a varied rhythmic landscape marked by expressive shifts, pauses, peaks, and valleys of sound. Dynamic changes needed to become more forceful. The flow of energy during a piece required constant management, even micromanagement, to produce contrasts of sublime distinction. Devices that had seemed too outrageous before—irregular phrases, disjunctive shifts of key, unexpected silences, even comic effects—were now cultivated by composers and celebrated by audiences. They were just a different slice of the eccentricities and quirks expected from the demigods of classical music.

从此以后，这两种趋势将以令人眼花缭乱的速度推动音乐向前发展。首先，音乐与传记和人物的联系变得密不可分，以至于纯粹的音乐学，任何仅凭音符来定义歌曲或风格，都会沦为愚昧的策略，成为对谱号上个人回忆录的刻意拒绝。有时，这种个人印记显而易见，例如协奏曲的演变——在莫扎特对曲式完善的推动下，协奏曲在这一时期达到了新的艺术高度——它越来越强调独奏者在准叙事结构中作为主角的地位。但即使是交响曲和交响诗，或者一个极端的例子，表面上旨在颂扬大写“C”的造物主的礼拜音乐，最终也以小写“C”来体现作曲家-创造者的身份。第二种趋势与第一种趋势相联系，听众不仅要求他们的领衔作曲家提供自传，还要求他们提供激进、具有爆发力的作品。这些自我表述宣扬着作曲家的伟大，以及对普通人所有日常规则的豁免。此外，还有潜藏在听众幻想生活中的第三个未言明的因素：即暗示他们也享受着同样的自由，一种愤怒的替代。作为乐迷，他们也可以享受蔑视权威、打破规则的乐趣。

These two trends will propel music forward at a dizzying pace from this point onward. First, music becomes inextricably tied up with biography and character, to such an extent that pure musicology, any definition of song or style by the notes alone, turns into a fool’s gambit, a willful refusal to read the personal memoirs inscribed in the staff lines. Sometimes this personal stamp is obvious, as with the evolution of the concerto—which reaches a new level of artistry around this time under the impetus of Mozart’s perfection of the form—with its growing emphasis on the soloist as protagonist in a quasi-narrative structure. But even symphony and tone poem, or, in an extreme example, liturgical music that ostensibly aims to celebrate the Creator with a capital C, end up manifesting the composer-creator with a small c. The second tendency, linked to the first, finds audiences demanding not just autobiography from their leading composers, but radical, explosive self-representations that proclaim the composer’s greatness and exemption from all the everyday rules of ordinary people. And then there’s the unspoken third factor that lingers hidden in the listener’s fantasy life: namely, the implication that they are enjoying this same freedom by extension, a kind of surrogacy of outrage. As fans, they, too, can enjoy the snubbing of authorities and the breaking of rules.

这就是秘诀，一种包装好的颠覆性作品，随时准备在市场上出售，如今依然如此。从今往后，听众将需要音乐，它能成为一种社会刺激物，并为创作者们提供平台，让他们能够敏感敏感。当然，这一切都预示着革命，或者更准确地说，是永不停歇的革命，这些革命将以不屈不挠的势头推动音乐向前发展，既无终点，也无休止。从今往后，歌曲或许好坏参半，或许快乐悲伤，或许快节奏，或许缓慢，一如既往，但它们也会越来越具有颠覆性和挑衅性——有时甚至会激励听众也做出同样的举动。

This is the recipe, a kind of packaged subversion ready for sale in the marketplace, and it still fits the bill in the present day. Henceforth audiences will demand music that acts as a kind of social irritant and platform for the prickly personalities who make it. Of course, all this promises revolution, or, more accurately, revolutions, ongoing ones without cease that will drive music forward with unrelenting momentum, and neither endpoint nor resting spot. Songs, from now on, might be good or bad, happy or sad, fast or slow, just as they were in the past, but they will increasingly disrupt and provoke as well—and sometimes spur their listeners to do the same.

18

18

你说你想要一场革命？

You Say You Want a Revolution?

这必然将我们引向贝多芬。所有这些倾向在他身上达到了顶峰。如今，音乐是人类精神的宣言，而不仅仅是一种普通的人类精神。听众需要一位超越生命的、超越生命的伟人。如果说颠覆和离谱的行为曾经被音乐家们隐藏起来，只在没有赞助人的情况下才会私下发生，那么如今，这些行为被培养并展现出来。更奇怪的是，如今音乐家们被期望对各种事务——从个人到政治——发表自己的观点和看法。音乐本身被转化为一种社会政治宣言，一种对世界的声明，以及未来变革的预兆。

This leads us, by necessity, to the subject of Beethoven. All these tendencies reach their culmination in him. Music is now the declaration of the human spirit, and not just an ordinary human spirit. The audience demands a towering figure, larger than life. If subversion and outrageous behavior were previously hidden from view by musicians, kept to private moments when a patron wasn’t around to observe, they are now cultivated and put on display. Even stranger, musicians are now expected to have opinions, views on all sorts of matters, from the personal to the political. The music itself is transformed into a kind of sociopolitical manifesto, a statement on the world as well as a harbinger of changes to come.

巴赫在世时，几乎没有人真正关心他的政治观点，即使在他被奉为经典作曲家之后，也几乎无人问津。但贝多芬的作品却透过革命、动荡和价值体系冲突的棱镜来审视一切。音乐史上，政治派系首次为乐谱争斗，如同争夺战中的领土。

No one really cared much about deciphering Bach’s political views, certainly not during his lifetime, and hardly at all even after he became enshrined as a canonic composer. But with Beethoven, everything gets viewed through a prism of revolution, upheaval, and clashing value systems. For the first time in music history, political factions battle over musical scores, fighting for them as if they were territory at stake in a war.

你是否还对贝多芬抱有这样一种印象：他是古典音乐的终极权威、交响乐传统的基石和权威的象征？1956 年，查克·贝里想要宣布摇滚乐的胜利，他用一首热门歌曲宣告“滚吧，贝多芬”。这首歌在接下来的二十五年里不断以各种翻唱版本回到排行榜。每一个狂热分子、改装车爱好者和有原因或无原因的反叛者都知道，为什么这位受人尊敬的德国作曲家会被单挑出来辱骂。他就是那个人，整个令人讨厌的古板体面音乐传统都集中在一个压迫性的人物身上。贝里的唱片占领电波六年后，安东尼·伯吉斯出版了他的小说《发条橙》，讲述了一个年轻恶棍的故事，他通过厌恶疗法被训练成每次听到贝多芬第九交响曲就会感到恶心。系统的目的是毁灭你们，朋友们，而“欢乐颂”就是它的统治工具。

Do you still have an image of Beethoven as the ultimate classical music insider, the bedrock of the symphonic tradition, and symbol of the establishment? When Chuck Berry wanted to announce the triumph of rock ’n’ roll in 1956, he declared “Roll Over, Beethoven,” in a hit song that kept returning to the charts in various cover versions over the next quarter century. And every sock-hopper, hot-rodder, and rebel-with-or-without-a-cause knew exactly why the esteemed German composer was singled out for abuse. He was the Man, the whole annoying tradition of fuddy-duddy respectable music summed up in a single oppressive figure. Six years after Berry’s record took over the airwaves, Anthony Burgess published his novel A Clockwork Orange, featuring a young thug who is trained via aversion therapy to get nauseous every time he hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The System is out to destroy you, mates, and the “Ode to Joy” is its tool of domination.

千万别信。这些都是书中反复探讨的辩证法的典型例子，正是这种非凡的反复无常，将音乐激进分子转变为现状维护者。老一代的音乐革命者永远不会消亡，他们只是被主流机构同化了。如果你只看到机构的形象，你就错过了真正的行动。你被赋予了贝多芬品牌特许经营权，这个概念被用来服务于各种利益，几乎肯定是经济利益或意识形态利益，通常两者兼而有之。

Don’t believe a word of it. These are defining examples of the dialectic explored repeatedly in these pages, that remarkable flip-flop that transforms musical radicals into upholders of the status quo. Old musical revolutionaries never die, they just get assimilated into mainstream institutions. If you only see the institutional figure, you are missing the real action. You have been given Beethoven as brand franchise, a construct used to serve various interests, almost certainly financial or ideological in nature, and usually both.

西方音乐史上，没有哪位人物像路德维希·范·贝多芬那样被如此激烈地利用和扭曲。多年来，他的《欢乐颂》受到纳粹德国和苏联领导人、毛泽东的文化大革命（当时几乎所有西方音乐在中国都被禁止）、秘鲁光辉道路恐怖分子阿比马埃尔·古兹曼以及南非种族隔离政权的拥护。贝多芬的《第九交响曲》是为了纪念柏林墙的倒塌而演奏的，但被推翻的政权此前却将这位伟大的作曲家视为自己的一员。一部作品怎么能对如此迥异且对立的意识形态产生如此大的象征意义？（奇怪的是，这部交响曲也出现在技术战中：索尼和飞利浦合作开发（在CD领域，他们就新格式所需的播放时间争论不休。据说，他们最终达成一致，一张CD应该有足够的存储空间来容纳贝多芬《第九交响曲》的全部时长。）

And no figure in the history of Western music has been co-opted and distorted with more vehemence than Ludwig van Beethoven. His “Ode to Joy” has been embraced, over the years, by the leaders of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Mao’s Cultural Revolution (at a point when almost all Western music was forbidden in China), the Peruvian Shining Path terrorist Abimael Guzman, and the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was performed to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the very regime toppled had previously claimed the great composer as one of its own. How can a single work carry so much symbolic resonance for such disparate—and opposed—ideologies? (Oddly enough, this symphony has also figured in technology battles: when Sony and Philips collaborated on the development of the compact disk, they bickered endlessly over the necessary running time for the new format. According to legend, they finally agreed that a CD should have sufficient storage space to accommodate the full duration of Beethoven’s Ninth.)

围绕贝多芬这首作品的争论至今仍在继续。1985年，这部交响曲中的《欢乐颂》被选为欧盟国歌。贝多芬的《第九交响曲》因此成为英国脱欧公投时的一首抗议歌曲。2017年7月，在皇家阿尔伯特音乐厅的一场音乐会上，引座员甚至出面阻止观众在演奏《第九交响曲》时挥舞欧盟旗帜。同月，唐纳德·特朗普和弗拉基米尔·普京抵达汉堡参加二十国集团峰会时，德国总理安格拉·默克尔确保这首贝多芬作品成为娱乐节目的一部分。这是一种尖锐的政治声明，旁观者也如此认为。然而，普京本人已宣布效忠贝多芬，称这位德国作曲家是他最喜爱的作曲家之一。就在G20峰会召开的同一周，特朗普在华沙对听众说，他的政策就像一首交响乐——一些观察人士认为，这位来访的总统是在模仿贝多芬。查克·贝里显然没抓住重点。贝多芬依然健在，而且显然是所有政党和政权的支持者。

And the battles over this single work in Beethoven’s oeuvre continue in the current day. The “Ode to Joy” from this symphony was selected as the official anthem of the European Union in 1985. Beethoven’s Ninth thus emerged as a protest song when Britain voted to exit the European Union. At a concert in the Royal Albert Hall in July 2017, ushers even intervened to stop audience members from waving EU flags during a performance of the Ninth Symphony. When Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin showed up in Hamburg for the G-20 conference that same month, German chancellor Angela Merkel made sure this same Beethoven work was part of the entertainment. This was a pointed political statement, and seen as such by onlookers. Yet Putin himself has announced his allegiance to Beethoven, naming the German composer as one of his favorites, and in the very same week as the G-20 gathering, Trump told an audience in Warsaw that his own policies were like a symphony—a comment that some observers perceived as a kind of Beethoven impersonation by the visiting president. Chuck Berry clearly missed the mark. Beethoven is alive and well, and apparently a supporter of every party and regime.

这场争论自贝多芬学术研究诞生以来就一直存在。贝多芬去世后，他的秘书兼早期传记作者安东·辛德勒将这位伟大的作曲家描绘成一位直言不讳的激进分子和革命支持者。但作曲家文森特·丹第在1911年出版了贝多芬传记，他驳斥了这种说法。他宣称：“雅各宾主义只会令他真诚的心灵感到厌恶。”贝多芬最著名的传记作者亚历山大·惠洛克·塞耶（1817-1897）在对贝多芬日常生活的细致记述中力求找到中间立场——他自豪地宣称：“我不为任何理论而战。”但这并没有阻止这场争论持续到现代。近年来，学者史蒂文·朗夫自信地断言，保守价值观最终主导了贝多芬的世界观。相比之下，传记作家梅纳德·所罗门则将贝多芬誉为一位乌托邦式的空想家。此外，根据共产主义统治结束前举行的波茨坦会议，贝多芬“达到了马克思学说的门槛”，并将自己的音乐视为“革命性的、实践批判性的功绩”。看来，学者们在争夺这位早已去世的作曲家的地盘时，与政客们一样充满争议^。1

This debate has been going on since the birth of Beethoven scholarship. After Beethoven’s death, his secretary and early biographer Anton Schindler presented the great composer as an outspoken radical and supporter of revolution. But composer Vincent d’Indy, who published a biography of Beethoven in 1911, denounced this claim. “Jacobinism,” he declared, “could be only repugnant to his honest heart.” Beethoven’s most famous biographer, Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817–1897), aimed to take a middle ground in his meticulous accounting of Beethoven’s day-to-day life—“I fight for no theories,” he proudly proclaimed—but that hardly stopped the debate from raging on into modern times. In recent years, scholar Steven Rumph has confidently asserted that conservative values eventually dominated Beethoven’s worldview. Biographer Maynard Solomon, in contrast, celebrates Beethoven as a utopian visionary. And, according to a Potsdam conference held before the end of communist rule, Beethoven “reached the threshold of Marx’s teachings” and viewed his music as a “revolutionary, practical-critical deed.” The scholars, it seems, are just as contentious as the politicians in their turf wars over the long-dead composer.¹

贝多芬留下的那些相​​互矛盾、不断变动的证据无济于事。即便是他最著名的政治姿态也充满了摇摆不定和优柔寡断。贝多芬为纪念拿破仑而创作了第三交响曲，但后来却从乐谱中划掉了献词。这部原本应该被称为《波拿巴》的作品现在被称为《英雄交响曲》。这种拒绝常常被解释为拿破仑称帝时贝多芬感到非常沮丧。然而即使在这里，我们也找不到作曲家行为的一致性。贝多芬反对君主制吗？几乎没有！他的前两首大提琴奏鸣曲是献给普鲁士国王弗里德里希·威廉二世的。他的降 E 大调七重奏，作品 20，献给女皇玛丽亚·特蕾莎。1802 年，他为俄国沙皇亚历山大一世创作了三首小提琴和钢琴奏鸣曲。 1813年，他创作了《威灵顿的胜利》，献给未来的乔治四世，甚至还在乐谱中加入了“天佑吾王”的歌词。他的第九交响曲献给了普鲁士国王腓特烈·威廉三世。他临终前完成的最后一部重要作品，降B大调第十三号弦乐四重奏的新终曲，在作曲家去世一个月后首次公开演出，是献给俄罗斯王子尼古拉·戈利岑的作品的一部分。戈利岑出身于一个权势显赫的家族，至今仍在宣扬其对已消失封地的显赫头衔。

Beethoven didn’t help matters with the conflicting and shifting bits of evidence he left behind. Even his most famous political gesture was marked by wavering and indecision. Beethoven wrote his Third Symphony to honor Napoleon, but then scratched out the dedication from the score. The work that was supposed to be called Bonaparte is now known as the Eroica Symphony. This repudiation is often explained by citing Beethoven’s dismay when Napoleon declared himself emperor. Yet even here we will find no consistency in the composer’s behavior. Did Beethoven oppose monarchical institutions? Hardly! His first two sonatas for cello were dedicated to Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia. His Septet in E-flat major, Opus 20, is dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa. In 1802 he dedicated three sonatas for violin and piano to Tsar Alexander I of Russia. In 1813, he composed Wellington’s Victory and dedicated it to the future George IV—and even interpolated “God Save the King” into the score. His Ninth Symphony was dedicated to Frederick William III of Prussia. And the last substantial work he completed before dying, the new finale to his String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, given its initial public performance a month after the composer’s death, was part of a piece dedicated to Russian Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, member of a powerful family that even today proclaims its impressive titles over vanished fiefdoms.

贝多芬与皇室的亲密关系贯穿了他的整个职业生涯，例子不胜枚举。1814年维也纳会议召开时，贝多芬为当时相当于二十国集团会议的会议提供了娱乐，这位曾经的拿破仑崇拜者似乎完全沉浸在泰德·纽金特模式中，为反动势力提供音乐。但这是否应该让我们感到惊讶，因为这位作曲家的名字本身就带有荷兰语“van”的意味。类似于德语“von”（冯）作为贵族出身的象征——误导人们以为他出身显赫？贝多芬几乎没有做出任何努力来澄清这种错误观念，但他也视自己为平民百姓和受压迫者的支持者——只要看看他的歌剧《费德里奥》就能找到确凿的证据。我们该如何调和这些矛盾？或许，关于贝多芬在富人和穷人之争中的立场，最稳妥的说法是，他可以根据情况扮演任何一方的角色。

Many other examples could be cited of Beethoven’s comfy relationship with royalty, spanning his entire career. By the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814, where Beethoven provided entertainment for his generation’s equivalent of a G-20 conference, the onetime admirer of Napoleon seemed to be in full Ted Nugent mode, serving up music for the forces of reaction. But should this surprise us coming from a composer whose very name—with its Dutch “van” resembling the German “von” as a sign of noble birth—misled people into thinking he was of exalted origins? Beethoven did little to clear up this false perception, yet he also saw himself as a man of the people and a supporter of the downtrodden—just watch his opera Fidelio for proof positive. How do we reconcile these contradictions? Perhaps the safest thing one can say about Beethoven’s allegiances in the battle between haves and have-nots is that he could play either side as the occasion warranted.

即便如此，我相信我们能够拨开这些令人困惑的事实，对贝多芬的核心价值观达成一个较为清晰的理解。事实上，他正是我在本书中所阐述观点的完美案例。本书追溯了一个反复出现的现象——尽管时代和文化背景存在显著差异，但这一现象却出奇地一致——那就是创新往往源自那些具有颠覆性的外来者，他们撼动了那些后来宣称拥有这些创新的体制。如果这些反叛者能够活得足够久，他们甚至可能参与到他们先前激进姿态的主流化中。猫王埃尔维斯来到白宫与尼克松攀谈。迪伦获得了诺贝尔奖。贾格尔被授予爵士头衔。在其他情况下，这种转变发生在幕后，没有被记录者和历史学家记录下来，尽管留下了一些确凿的证据。一首出自无名女子的情歌，不知何故被改编成《旧约》经文，并被归于所罗门王之手；又或者被收录进《诗经》，为孔子的荣耀锦上添花；又或者，一位高贵的吟游诗人对其进行模仿，将其转化为经典文学。由此产生的融合或许会被斥责为挪用或直接窃取知识产权，但这一过程依然是推动音乐史变革的持续动力。它曾经发生过；它还会再次发生。即便如此，我们仍必须警惕轻信几乎总是伴随这种同化而来的修正主义历史。音乐史学家需要超越主流机构事后强加的意识形态解读——它们几乎总是编造故事来为自己的议程辩护——并努力发掘创新的本质，以及推动整个进程的外部棘手且具有破坏性的力量。

Even so, I believe we can get behind these confusing facts and arrive at a reasonably clear understanding of Beethoven’s core values. In fact, he is a perfect case study for the claims I’ve made in this book. A recurring phenomenon traced in these pages—a surprisingly consistent one, despite marked differences in epochs and cultures—finds innovations coming from disruptive outsiders who shake up the very same institutions that later lay claim to them. If these rebels live long enough, they may even participate in the mainstreaming of their previously radical pose. Elvis shows up at the White House to hobnob with Nixon. Dylan accepts a Nobel Prize. Jagger gets knighted. In other instances, the shift happens behind the scenes, undocumented by scribes and historians, although incriminating evidence gets left behind. An erotic love song from an anonymous woman is somehow turned into Old Testament scripture and attributed to King Solomon, or finds its way into the Shijing and adds to the glory of Confucius, or a noble troubadour imitates it, transforming it into canonic literature. The resulting synthesis can be denounced as appropriation or outright theft of intellectual property, but this process remains an ongoing engine of change in music history. It happened before; it will happen again. Even so, we must guard against the gullible acceptance of the revisionist history that almost always accompanies this assimilation. The historian of music needs to look beyond the ideological interpretations that the prevailing institutions impose after the fact—they are almost always spinning a story to justify their own agendas—and work to recover the essence of the innovation, the prickly and disruptive force from the outside that set the whole process in motion.

如果我们用这个解释模型来解开作曲家贝多芬的神秘面纱，会发现什么呢？如果我们研究他早期的创作表现，他是否符合这个模式？一旦我们追溯他的影响根源，他圆滑老练、技艺精湛的圈内人形象是否就消失了？让我们看看同时代人是如何看待路德维希·范·贝多芬早期职业生涯的。钢琴家冯·伯恩哈德夫人在私人聚会上遇到这位作曲家，她给我们留下了这样的描述：“他身材矮小，不起眼，一张满是痘痕的丑陋红脸。他的头​​发乌黑蓬乱地垂在脸上。他的衣着非常普通，丝毫没有当时，尤其是在我们这个圈子里，人们所习以为常的那种精致。此外，他操着一口浓重的方言，表达方式也相当普通，他的举止举止都缺乏任何外在的优雅；相反，他的举止举止都很粗鲁。他非常傲慢。”这很容易被误认为是约翰尼·罗顿或卢·里德的描述，但我们这里讨论的是贝多芬。冯·伯恩哈德夫人继续讲述一个轶事：一位伯爵夫人恳求贝多芬在聚会上弹钢琴，甚至在他坐在沙发上时跪在他面前，却遭到这位冉冉升起的年轻音乐明星的断然拒绝。作曲家卡尔·车尔尼分享了另一个展现贝多芬轻蔑态度的非凡例子。在用他的即兴演奏让观众眼花缭乱、泪流满面（有些人甚至能听到抽泣声）之后，贝多芬嘲笑他的听众，公开嘲讽他们。“你们是傻瓜！”他宣称。“谁能继续和这些被宠坏的孩子生活在一起？”车尔尼总结道：“在演奏了这样的即兴演奏之后，他拒绝了普鲁士国王的邀请。” ²

What do we find if we use this explanatory model to unravel the mysteries of the composer Beethoven? If we study him in his earliest manifestations, does he fit this pattern? Does his status as a slick, skilled insider disappear as soon as we trace his impact back to its roots? Let’s see how a contemporary perceived Ludwig van Beethoven at an early stage of his career. Frau von Bernhard, a pianist who encountered the composer at private gatherings, left us this description: “He was short and insignificant with an ugly red face full of pockmarks. His hair was very dark and hung tousled about his face. His attire was very ordinary and not remotely of the choiceness that was customary in those days and especially in our circles. Besides, he spoke in a pronounced dialect and had a rather common way of expressing himself, indeed his entire deportment showed no signs of exterior polish; on the contrary, he was unmannerly both in demeanor and behavior. He was very proud.” This could just as easily be a description of Johnny Rotten or Lou Reed, but it’s Beethoven we’re dealing with here. Frau von Bernhard continues with an anecdote about a countess begging Beethoven to play piano at a gathering, and even getting on her knees before him as he sat on the sofa, only to be rebuffed by the rising young music star. Composer Carl Czerny shares another extraordinary example of Beethoven’s scornful attitudes. After dazzling an audience with his improvisation, bringing them to tears (some audibly sobbing), Beethoven laughed at his listeners and openly mocked them. “You are fools!” he declared. “Who can continue to live among such spoiled children?” Czerny concludes: “He declined to accept an invitation from the King of Prussia after an improvisation of this kind.”²

我们愿意相信，音乐界的领袖们忽略了贝多芬“身材矮小、面色红肿、丑陋”的事实，并且他们深知在他粗鲁的外表背后隐藏着罕见的天才。在这种情况下，我们无需猜测，因为早期作曲家的作品往往缺乏文献记载，关于他们作品的最初反响，这种情况屡见不鲜。贝多芬的成长时期，音乐评论蓬勃发展，因此我们确切地知道舆论领袖如何看待他的创新？他们当时怎么说？《英雄交响曲》如今已被尊崇为音乐史上的里程碑和德国浪漫主义的丰碑，这种无处不在的时代精神试图塑造欧洲高雅文化的心理和音景。然而，在正式首演之前，报摊上就出现了对这部作品的第一篇评论，评论称其音乐“刺耳而怪诞”。另一位报道首演的记者承认，这部作品有一些辩护者，但对于普通人来说，“这部交响曲难度太大，篇幅太长，而且[贝多芬]本人也太粗鲁了。”这种评价并非夸张。出席音乐会的卡尔·车尔尼报道说，一位听众在演出中途站起来喊道：“只要这玩意儿能停下来，我就再给你一枚克鲁采！” ³

We would like to believe that leaders of the music establishment overlooked the fact that Beethoven was “short and insignificant with an ugly red face,” and that they grasped the rare genius behind the boorish exterior. In this case, we don’t need to guess, as is so often the case with earlier composers, where little documentation exists about the first responses to their works. Music criticism was flourishing during Beethoven’s formative years, so we know exactly how opinion leaders viewed his innovations. What did they say at the time? The first review of the Eroica Symphony—now revered as a milestone in music history and a monument to German Romanticism, that all-pervasive zeitgeist out to shape the psyches and soundscapes of European high culture—arrived on the newsstand even before the official premiere, dismissing the music as “strident and bizarre.” Another journalist, covering the debut, admitted that the work had some defenders, but for the average person “the symphony was too difficult, too long and [Beethoven] himself was too impolite.” This assessment was no exaggeration. Carl Czerny, who attended the concert, reported that one listener rose up in the middle of the performance and shouted: “I’ll give another kreutzer if the thing will only stop!”³

我可以用一整章的篇幅来描述这样的攻击和尖刻的驳斥。这些批评家并非无知或古怪的傻瓜，而是既定秩序中知识渊博的代表。他们并非异类，而是一场运动的一部分。事实上，他们显然彼此商量过，因为同样的词句在对贝多芬的攻击中反复出现。他的音乐被认为怪异、奇特、武断、怪诞、神秘、阴郁、费力。即使是海顿，这位似乎倾向于成为年轻贝多芬的导师和拥护者的人物，也不愿完全理解这位弟子风格的含义。当贝多芬向海顿展示他作品一号中的三个钢琴三重奏时，这位老作曲家建议他不要出版这组作品的最终版本。贝多芬意识到（后人也如此认为），这是这些早期三重奏中最重要的、最成熟、最令人印象深刻的作品。或许正如贝多芬所推测的那样，海顿对下一代心怀嫉妒和怨恨。但我们知道这位老一辈作曲家对莫扎特的热情赞扬，因此他不太可能仅仅因为一位年轻天才的明显迹象就对其进行贬低。结论是不可避免的：即使是欧洲在世的最伟大的作曲家，也认为贝多芬是一个反复无常的局外人，他的冲动需要被抑制，一个难以捉摸的暴发户，应该适应既定的做事方式。贝多芬的体制重塑当时还处于未来数年，其驱动力与实际创新者几乎毫无关联——在大多数情况下，其误导性大于澄清性。对于当时在场的人来说，贝多芬是一位颠覆者，而非整合者。

I could fill up an entire chapter with such attacks and curt dismissals. And these critics weren’t ignorant or eccentric fools, but knowledgeable representatives of the established order. They weren’t outliers, but part of a movement. In fact, they clearly consulted with one another, because the same words appeared again and again in attacks on Beethoven. His music was deemed strange, peculiar, arbitrary, bizarre, mysterious, gloomy, and laborious. Even Haydn, who seemed inclined to serve as a mentor and champion for the young Beethoven, backed away from the full implications of his disciple’s style. When Beethoven showed Haydn the three piano trios in his Opus 1, the older composer advised him that the final work in the group should not be published. Beethoven recognized (as has posterity) that this was the most important of these early trios, the most mature and impressive. Perhaps Haydn was jealous and resentful of the next generation, as Beethoven surmised. But our knowledge of the older composer’s enthusiasm in praising Mozart makes it unlikely that he would denounce a younger talent simply because of marked signs of genius. The conclusion is inescapable: even the greatest living composer in Europe saw Beethoven as a volatile outsider whose impulses needed to be held in check, an unpredictable upstart who ought to adapt to established ways of doing things. The institutional rebranding of Beethoven was still years in the future, and driven by agendas that have little connection with the actual innovator—and in most instances, do more to mislead than clarify. For those on the scene, Beethoven was a disruptor, not a consolidator.

关键在于，当贝多芬被视为这种反复出现的颠覆性创新过程的一部分时，几乎所有关于贝多芬的明显悖论和冲突都会消失，而几年之后，当权者就会开始争夺先前受到攻击的个人。即使是贝多芬的政治观点也可以相当有把握地解读，不需要任何智力体操。当贝多芬明确地将核心价值融入音乐作品中时——比如《费德里奥》中的“自由”或《第九交响曲》中的“欢乐”——他总是以最直接的方式进行，没有太多的意识形态包袱。《费德里奥》属于一种流行的救援歌剧子类型，与现代的越狱电影如《大逃亡》、《肖申克的救赎》或《第一滴血 2》并无太大区别。当时和现在一样，这些故事可以融入各种各样的历史背景，但很难成为对人类解放进行严肃哲学思考的载体。第九交响曲中的《欢乐颂》也是如此，这首曲子经常被各种乐章轻易地借用——但原因显而易见，它只是提出了一些模糊的主张。如果这是一份政治宣言，它几乎不会引发争议。贝多芬为这部作品选择的文本中最冒险的主张是，我们所有人都是兄弟般的，彼此相连，或者或许是对神圣造物主的认可。信息的简洁性正是其精髓和吸引力的一部分。

The key point is that almost all the apparent paradoxes and clashes over Beethoven fall away when he is seen as part of this recurring process of disruptive innovation followed, after a few years, by establishment turf battles to claim the very individuals previously attacked. Even Beethoven’s political views can be deciphered with a reasonable degree of confidence, and no intellectual gymnastics required. When Beethoven explicitly inserted a core value into a musical work—as with “freedom” in Fidelio or “joy” in the Ninth Symphony—it is invariably done in the most straightforward, most direct possible way, without a lot of ideological baggage. Fidelio was part of a popular subgenre of rescue operas, not much different from the prisoner breakout movies of modern times, such as The Great Escape, The Shawshank Redemption, or Rambo: First Blood Part II. Then as now, these stories can be fitted into a wide range of historical settings, but are hardly vehicles for serious philosophical thinking on matters of human liberation. The same could be said of the “Ode to Joy” in the Ninth Symphony, the piece so frequently and easily co-opted by various movements—but for the obvious reason that it makes such vague claims. If this is a political manifesto, it’s hardly a controversial one. The most dicey claim in the text Beethoven chose for this work is that all of us are linked in brotherhood, or perhaps the acknowledgment of a divine creator. The simplicity of the message is part of its essence and appeal.

要理解贝多芬所谓的自由，我们最好回顾一下思想史学家以赛亚·伯林在其颇具影响力的论文《自由的两种概念》中做出的关键区分。4^伯林提醒我们注意他所谓的积极自由与消极自由之间的深刻区别。积极自由通常涉及精心设计的政治议程来实现其目标，而消极自由可以简单到只是免受干涉的自由。贝多芬更倾向于消极自由阵营。只需看看他1792年的歌曲《谁是自由人？》（Wer ist ein freier Mann?）的歌词即可：

To understand what Beethoven actually meant by freedom, we do well to turn to a crucial distinction that intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin made in his influential essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”⁴ Berlin calls our attention to the profound divide between what he calls positive liberty, which often involves elaborate political agendas to achieve its goals, and negative liberty, which can be as simple as freedom from interference. Beethoven leans more closely toward the negative camp. Just look at the words to his 1792 song “Wer ist ein freier Mann?” (Who is a free man?):

谁是自由人？

Who is a free man?

一个人只靠自己的意志，

The man to whom his own will alone,

而不是任何领主的心血来潮

And not any overlord’s whim

可以給他法律。

Can give him the law.

那是一个自由人！⁵

That is a free man!⁵

这本质上就是消极自由的定义。《费德里奥》中囚犯走出牢房的著名场景，几乎是这一价值观在舞台上展现的幻想形象。囚徒挣脱锁链，重见天日，不再受压迫者的束缚。同样的情感也体现在《欢乐颂》中，它颂扬的不是政党纲领，而是不可侵犯的人类精神。像贝多芬这样的消极自由的倡导者可能会与各种政党、纲领和当权者结成短期联盟——事实上，他们常常被迫这样做，以维护自己珍视的独立性——但这些联盟的转变不应令我们感到惊讶。从更广阔的角度来看，贝多芬的核心价值观保持着非凡的一致性，这些价值观主要源于人类尊严感，而非对机构的效忠。

This is essentially the definition of negative liberty. The famous scene in Fidelio of the prisoners emerging from their cells is almost a fantasy image of that value made manifest on the stage. The captives shake off their chains and emerge into the light of day, no longer held in bondage by oppressors. The same sentiment is made manifest in the “Ode to Joy,” which celebrates no party platform, but rather the inviolable human spirit. Advocates of negative liberty such as Beethoven might enter into short-term alliances with various parties, programs, and potentates—indeed, they are often forced to do so in order to maintain their own cherished independence—but shifts in these affiliations should not surprise us. From the larger perspective, Beethoven maintained extraordinary consistency in his core values, which were primarily driven by a sense of human dignity rather than institutional allegiances.

音乐史上99%的虚假信息和宣传都来自机构——当然，也包括那些不知情、轻信其荒诞故事的受骗者。他们旨在推广自身议程，而非成为历史真相的灯塔，他们的主张必须始终经过仔细审查，并与一手资料进行核对。贝多芬和恩赫杜安娜（Enheduanna）的情况都一样。恩赫杜安娜是我们所知的第一位音乐家——回想一下第五章的记载，那块纪念她重要性的石碑被后来的某个权力掮客污损打碎——或者本书中提到的其他任何一位创新者。唯一改变的是：如今机构的手段往往更加巧妙，只会偶尔破坏石碑。

Ninety-nine percent of the disinformation and propaganda in music history comes from institutions—and, of course, the unwitting dupes who swallow their tall tales. They aim to promote their agendas, not serve as beacons to historical truth, and their claims must always be scrutinized and checked against primary sources. This is as true with Beethoven as it is with Enheduanna, the first musician known to us by name—to recall the account from Chapter 5, the very stone disk that celebrates her importance was defaced and broken into pieces by some later power broker—or any of the other innovators dealt with in these pages. The only thing that’s changed: institutions tend to be subtler with their methods nowadays, and only occasionally resort to defacing stone memorials.

在应对十九世纪音乐的另一个明显悖论时，我们需要牢记这一点。浪漫主义的狂热与明星音乐家的崛起和不断扩大的经济机会相吻合，这减少了他们对统治机构。这场运动几乎处处颂扬个人，摒弃体制。音乐创造力的情感和心理基础受到前所未有的推崇。就连音乐明星的粗鲁和傲慢不仅被容忍，甚至被视为天才的必然产物。当艺术家们抛开虚荣，渴望更上一层楼的力量和表达时，他们被期望将自然——一片风景、一朵孤独的云朵或繁星点点的夜空——作为他们的指路明灯，而不是教皇或王子。经验和情感的真理被视为无可辩驳，无论你从何处审视，个人的因素都胜过政治因素。

We need to keep this in mind as we grapple with another apparent paradox of nineteenth-century music. The cult of Romanticism coincided with the emergence of celebrity musicians and expanding economic opportunities that reduced their dependence on ruling institutions. Almost everything about this movement celebrated the individual and rejected the institutional. The emotional and psychological underpinnings of musical creativity were revered as never before. Even the rudeness and overweening pride of the music star were not only tolerated, but now cherished as the unmistakable attendants of genius. When artists, leaving vanity behind, aspired to still greater heights of power and expression, they were expected to turn to nature—a landscape or lonely cloud or starry night sky—as their guiding light, not to a pope or prince. Experiential and emotional truths were seen as irrefutable and, wherever you looked, the personal trumped the political.

只有将其与之前三千年的音乐史进行比较，我们才能体会到这种解放感是多么强烈。音乐史充斥着高高在上的统治者，处处侵犯艺术特权，即使是表达自由的微小进步也需要付出沉重的代价。最终，角色互换了。珀西·比希·雪莱在1821年宣称“诗人是世界未被承认的立法者”时，这绝非夸大其词——但他或许应该将作曲家、小说家、画家和雕塑家也纳入他想象中的创意精神议会。如今，王子们对顶尖艺术家卑躬屈膝，力求获得他们的青睐，并沐浴在他们自诩高贵的光芒中。但悖论在于：十九世纪音乐的整个景象都​​充斥着政治、宗教和民族主义派系，他们声称这些作曲家及其音乐是自己的。这些作曲家经常被描绘成某个事业或派系的代表。尽管他们的独立性被誉为其艺术的精髓，但却一次又一次地被当权者否定^。6

We can only grasp how liberating this must have felt by comparing it with the previous three thousand years of music history, a troubled narrative of high and mighty rulers intruding at every turn on artistic prerogatives, with even tiny gains in expressive freedom coming at a heavy cost. Finally, the roles were reversed. Percy Bysshe Shelley was hardly exaggerating when he declared in 1821 that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—but he probably should have also included composers, novelists, painters, and sculptors in his imagined parliament of creative spirits. Princes now kowtowed to leading artists, aiming to secure their favor and bask in the reflected glow of their self-made nobility. But here’s the paradox: the whole spectacle of music during the nineteenth century is marked by political, religious, and nationalistic factions who claim these composers and their music as their own. These composers are constantly portrayed as representatives of this cause or that faction. Even as their independence is celebrated as the essence of their artistry, it gets denied again and again by people in positions of authority.⁶

警惕这种歪曲——或者我们如今所说的叙事重构。我不否认，十九世纪伟大的音乐艺术家们能够做出与统治机构妥协的姿态，尤其是在他们寿命足够长的情况下。弗朗茨·李斯特最终加入了一个宗教团体，成为一名方济各会修士，并获得了神父的头衔。但如果我们试图透过教堂音乐的棱镜来看待他，我们就会得出一个非常误导性的李斯特的形象。意义。焦阿基诺·罗西尼也是如此，他甚至放弃了歌剧创作，转而创作了一些优秀的宗教音乐作品——然而，如果我们以此作为探究其作品的起点，就会从根本上误解他的艺术。约翰内斯·勃拉姆斯成名后，获得了巴伐利亚国王路德维希二世授予的马克西米利安科学与艺术勋章，迈宁根公爵乔治授予他迈宁根家族勋章的指挥官十字勋章。他是一个隐秘的君主主义者吗？如果你想评估勃拉姆斯真正的意识形态倾向，你最好听听安东宁·德沃夏克对他的描述：“这样一个人，这样一个优秀的灵魂——他什么都不信！他什么都不信！”即使在创作《德意志安魂曲》时，勃拉姆斯借鉴了宗教音乐传统，他也似乎倾向于忽略基督教和德国元素。他告诉指挥家卡尔·雷因塔勒：“就文本而言，我承认我甚至乐意省略“德语”一词，而改用“人性”；而且，根据我所知和意愿，我甚至愿意省略像《约翰福音》3:16 [‘神爱世人，甚至将他的独生子赐给他们’] 这样的段落。另一方面，我选择这样或那样的段落，是因为我是一名音乐家，因为我需要它，也因为面对我那些令人尊敬的作者，我无法删除或争论任何东西。但我最好还是打住，别说太多。”或者，也许他说得已经足够了^。7

Be wary of this spin—or what we would call nowadays a reframing of the narrative. I won’t deny that the great musical artists of the nineteenth century could make gestures of accommodation to ruling institutions, especially if they lived long enough. Franz Liszt eventually joined a religious order, became a Franciscan, and took on the title of abbé. But if we tried to view him through the prism of church music we would arrive at a very misleading picture of Liszt’s significance. The same is true of Gioachino Rossini, who even gave up writing operas, and composed instead some fine works of sacred music—yet we would fundamentally misunderstand his artistry if we took those as the starting point of our inquiry into his oeuvre. After his rise to fame, Johannes Brahms received the Maximilian Order for Science and Art from Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Duke George of Meiningen gave him the Commander’s Cross of the Order of the House of Meiningen. Was he a closet monarchist? If you want to assess Brahms’s actual ideological leanings, you would probably do better to heed Antonín Dvořák’s description of him: “Such a man, such a fine soul—and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!” Even when Brahms drew from the sacred music tradition while composing A German Requiem, he seemed inclined to leave out both the Christian and German elements. He told conductor Karl Reinthaler: “As far as the text is concerned, I confess that I would gladly omit even the word German and instead use Human; also with my best knowledge and will I would dispense with passages like John 3:16 [‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son’]. On the other hand, I have chosen one thing or another because I am a musician, because I needed it, and because with my venerable authors I can’t delete or dispute anything. But I had better stop before I say too much.” Or perhaps he said just enough.⁷

那么，那些英年早逝、未能获得机构认可的音乐家又如何呢？即便他们，也会在身后卷入政治角力。以弗朗茨·舒伯特为例，你很难找到比他更不可能成为政治人物的人。在同时代人看来，他沉浸在音乐之中，而非派系斗争和意识形态。他的性格堪称浪漫主义作曲家刻板印象的典型代表，是一位孤独的诗人，吟唱着萦绕心头的音景。“他沉默寡言，不爱说话，”舒伯特学生时代的挚友弗朗茨·埃克尔写道。他指出，即使是与这位作曲家关系密切的人，也难以打破他冷漠的外表。“在学生们一起散步的时候，他大多时候都保持距离，低着头，双手背在身后，若有所思地走着，拨弄着手指（仿佛……路易斯·施洛瑟曾拜访过舒伯特在维也纳的家，他对这位作曲家对周围环境缺乏兴趣感到震惊。他的住所缺乏家和壁炉的舒适感，而更像是一个工匠的工作室，里面摆满了钢琴、弦乐器、乐谱架、几把椅子和成堆的乐谱。施洛瑟总结道：“音乐是他生活和呼吸的氛围，在其中，他的主观性在不知不觉中达到了最高发展。” ⁸

And what of musicians who died so young they couldn’t receive the perks of institutional acclaim? Even they get caught up in posthumous political wrangling. Take, for example, the case of Franz Schubert. You could hardly find a less likely joiner-of-causes. To his contemporaries, he was immersed in music, not factionalism and ideology, and his personality could serve as a textbook example of the stereotyped Romanticist composer as a lonely poet of haunted soundscapes. “He was silent and uncommunicative,” wrote Franz Eckel, Schubert’s friend since their student days, who noted that even those close to the composer had trouble breaking through this aloof exterior. “On the walks which the pupils took together, he mostly kept apart, walking pensively along with lowered eyes and with his hands behind his back, playing with his fingers (as though on keys), completely lost in his own thoughts.” Louis Schlösser, who visited Schubert at his home in Vienna, was shocked at the composer’s lack of interest in his surroundings. His residence lacked the usual comforts of home and hearth, and looked instead like an artisan’s workshop, filled with his piano, string instruments, music stands, a few chairs, and piles of scores. “Music was the atmosphere in which he lived and breathed,” Schlösser concluded, “in which his subjectivity unconsciously attained its highest development.”⁸

但即使我们缺乏这些第一手资料，我们也应该从舒伯特的作品中得出同样的结论。他是同时代伟大作曲家中寿命最短的——舒伯特31岁就去世了——但他留下了1500多部音乐作品。他600多部声乐和钢琴作品至今仍是词曲作家的黄金标准，这些作品正是人们对这位内省型人物所期望的那种情绪化、充满情感的作品。每当一些流行文化杂志或评论家发布一份“史上最伟大”词曲作家名单，却没有弗朗茨·舒伯特的名字时，我总是感到惊讶。无论衡量标准是质量、影响力，还是仅仅因为他不懈的努力，他或许都应该名列前茅。人们不禁要问，舒伯特创作这些作品需要持续不断的劳动和奉献，他怎么会有时间生活——更不用说政治事业了？此外，他还创作了为管弦乐、钢琴、室内乐以及礼拜仪式创作的杰作，单凭这些作品本身就足以让他声名鹊起。事实上，除了这些作品之外，关于他的作品实在寥寥无几。“信息的匮乏催生了各种传记式的幻想，”音乐评论家亚历克斯·罗斯写道。“他本人尚未达到那种境界；他的音乐则完全是另一回事。它的存在感和即时性令人叹为观止。” ⁹

But even if we lacked these firsthand accounts, we ought to conclude as much from Schubert’s output. He had the shortest life span of any of the great composers of his era—Schubert died at age thirty-one—but left behind more than 1,500 musical works. His 600-plus pieces for voice and piano are still the gold standard for songwriters, and they are precisely the kinds of moody, emotion-filled works one would expect from such an introspective personality. I am always amazed when some pop culture magazine or pundit publishes a list of the greatest “all-time” songwriters and doesn’t include Franz Schubert. He probably belongs at the top of the list, whether the metric is quality, influence, or just sheer indefatigable effort. How, one wonders, did Schubert have any time for living—let alone political causes—given the ceaseless labor and dedication required to create this oeuvre? And then there are the masterworks for orchestra, piano, chamber ensembles, and liturgical settings, any of which alone would have earned him fame. Indeed, there isn’t much to write about him beyond these works. “The dearth of information has permitted every kind of biographical fantasy,” writes music critic Alex Ross. “The man is not quite there; the music is another thing altogether. Its presence and immediacy are tremendous.”⁹

然而，这并没有阻止后世将舒伯特的名字与各种运动联系起来，从纳粹极权主义到同性恋权利。然而，他或许是一位原始社会主义者——舒伯特曾与四位朋友一起被奥地利警方逮捕，当时警方试图铲除学生中的革命思潮，但他只因其侮辱性语言而受到训诫。然而，维也纳保守派在最后也声称舒伯特是他们自己的。舒伯特的音乐被誉为世纪之交，将他的音乐视为对现代思想腐朽之前那个更淳朴时代的怀旧回归。但舒伯特或许也值得被看作一位自由民粹主义者：只要看看他愿意为音乐厅、舞厅，甚至简陋的客厅钢琴谱曲，挑战文化沙皇的精英等级制度就明白了。这些事业都能找到一些证据来支持自己的主张。但这种契合从来都不完美，我们最终看到的舒伯特是一个局外人，专注于自己的事务，抗拒干扰，但更重要的是，他能回归到自己的创作。

Yet this hasn’t prevented later generations from attaching Schubert’s name to every kind of movement, from Nazi totalitarianism to gay rights. Then again, perhaps he was a proto-socialist—Schubert was arrested once, along with four friends, by Austrian police seeking to root out revolutionary currents among students, but was only given a reprimand for his insulting language. Yet Vienna conservatives would also claim Schubert as their own at the close of the century, celebrating his music as a nostalgic throwback to a simpler time, before the corruption of modern ideas. But Schubert might also deserve consideration as a liberal populist: just look at his willingness to write music for both the concert hall and the dance hall, or even the humble parlor piano, defying the elitist hierarchies of cultural czars. These causes all can find some evidence to promote their claims. But the fit is never perfect, and we are left with Schubert the outsider, focused on his own concerns and defiant against interference, but mostly so he can get back to his craft.

然而，如果我声称这一时期音乐制度控制的崩溃，很大程度上，甚至主要是由那些顶尖作曲家们尖锐而独立的个性所驱动，那我就误导你了。一个更大的因素是文化生态系统的内向转变，因为家庭和沙龙逐渐成为西方世界音乐创作的主要场所。在这里，脱离了教会和国家的控制，数百万业余和半职业音乐家为朋友、家人演奏作品，通常也只是为了自娱自乐。在十九世纪，他们的人数逐渐增加。这种转变影响了音乐的方方面面：音乐的创作方式；乐器的特色；音乐的出版、销售和传播方式；以及它带来的收入。

Yet I would mislead you if I claimed that the breakdown of institutional control of music during this period was driven largely, or even primarily, by the prickly, independent personalities of the leading composers. A much larger factor was the inward turn in the cultural ecosystem, as the home and salon emerged as the main locations for music-making in the Western world. Here, outside the control of church and state, millions of amateurs and semi-professional musicians performed pieces for friends, family, and often merely for their own enjoyment, their numbers gradually rising over the course of the nineteenth century. This shift impacted every aspect of music: how it was composed; the instruments featured; the way it was published, sold, and disseminated; and the income it generated.

这种变化的最初迹象可以追溯到文艺复兴末期，当时我们发现越来越多的证据表明，工匠和商人拥有乐器，聘请音乐教师，并希望通过几节课的学习，为子女带来更好的姻缘或提升家族声誉。随着中产阶级规模的扩大，自制音乐也随之兴起。即便如此，游历丰富的作曲家查尔斯·伯尼却表示，他在1770年的维也纳，以及他所访问的任何意大利城市，都找不到一家乐器商店。然而，在19世纪，由于生活水平的提高和钢琴价格的下降，音乐的民主化以前所未有的速度加速发展。为国王或教皇创作音乐或许仍然能获得赞誉和令人欣慰的自我提升，但作曲家们现在通过向屠夫、面包师和烛台制造商的子女出售作品来最大化收入。

The first signs of this change can be traced back to the end of the Renaissance, when we find growing evidence of artisans and tradespeople owning instruments, hiring music teachers, and hoping that a few lessons might lead to a better marriage match for their children or enhance the family’s reputation. As the middle class grew in size, so did homemade music. Even so, the well-traveled composer Charles Burney reported that he couldn’t find a single music store in Vienna in 1770, or in any of the Italian cities he visited. But the democratization of music accelerated with unprecedented speed during the 1800s, fueled by a rise in standards of living and a drop in the cost of pianos. Making music for a king or pope might still provide acclaim and a gratifying ego boost, but composers now maximized their income by selling to the sons and daughters of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers.

即使在舒伯特的时代，其对音乐的影响也显而易见——他的大部分作品都完美地为在简陋的家庭环境中进行私密演奏而设计。弗里德里克·肖邦（1810-1849）是一位几乎只为钢琴独奏创作的作曲家，这种职业选择在他出生前不久恐怕会是一场灾难。但如今，为独奏者创作的内省音乐不仅契合了时代精神，也迎合了市场需求。到1850年，这种转变已成定局。当时的伦敦名录显示，服务于当地市场的钢琴制造商多达两百家。为了满足日益增长的需求，专业制造商应运而生，为名牌钢琴提供琴键、琴盒或其他零件，从而提升了产品质量并降低了成本。二手钢琴供应日益增多——年轻人结婚后就不再需要——也使得钢琴价格更加亲民，也使得家用钢琴不再只是奢侈品，而成为必需品。在留声机发明前的最后几十年里，家用钢琴几乎涵盖了音乐文化的全部。歌曲在这里被创作，在这里被演奏，在这里被新的听众听到，在这里迅速走红或被遗忘。如果当时有公告牌排行榜，它们会衡量中产阶级家庭的键盘使用情况——而这如今已成为衡量音乐成败的关键。

Even by Schubert’s time, the impact on music is evident—the majority of his works are perfectly designed for intimate performance in humble domestic settings. With Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), we encounter a composer who wrote almost exclusively for solo piano, a career move that would have been disastrous only a short time before his birth. But introspective music for a solitary performer was now both aligned with the spirit of the age and tailored for the demands of the marketplace. By 1850, the change was complete. London directories from that period tell us that a staggering two hundred piano manufacturers served the local market. Specialized producers emerged in response to rising demand, providing keys or cases or other parts for the name brands, thus serving to improve quality and drive down cost. The growing availability of used instruments—no longer needed after the youngsters get married—added to their affordability and helped make a home piano not just a luxury but a necessity. In these final decades before the invention of the phonograph, the home piano embodied almost the entire scope of musical culture. It’s where songs were written, where they got performed, where they were heard by new listeners, where they went viral or were forgotten. If Billboard charts had existed back then, they would have measured keyboard activity in middle-class homes—that was now the make-or-break measure of musical success.

欧洲古典音乐的生态系统似乎正处于一个平静的家庭音乐创作时代的边缘，音乐创作的规模缩小到家庭和炉灶，在亲朋好友的滋养下得以发展。但音乐史上这些舒适的时光从来都不是长久之计。我怀疑，社会心理中某种固有的不稳定性，或是根深蒂固的文化躁动倾向，使得它们在几年内都无法定义音乐景观。每当主流音乐的领导者变得过于软弱或内省时，总会有更凶猛的掠食者出现，将他们赶下台。我坚信，19世纪90年代初，那些甜美伤感的歌曲主宰着美国流行乐坛，而当时平淡无奇的华尔兹《舞会之后》却成为美国历史上最畅销的歌曲，这只不过激起了听众对拉格泰姆、爵士和布鲁斯等超越传统的音乐的渴望。大萧条初期，浪漫情歌、温柔低吟和乐观新奇曲目的狂热，或许使得摇摆乐在20世纪30年代后半期的盛行中受到了听众的热烈欢迎。同样的情况也发生在20世纪50年代：前半期是平和流行音乐的黄金时代，而后半期则属于不羁摇滚乐的黄金时代。20世纪70年代，同样的情况再次发生，细腻低调的创作型歌手的时代持续了大约五年，之后，大胆的朋克和摇摆迪斯科占据了中心舞台。我不愿断言这20年是一个循环往复的时期，但我无法否认两极分化不断变化的证据：每当音乐文化变得过于轻松和亲切时，就预示着一场革命即将到来。

The classical music ecosystem in Europe seemed on the brink of an era of peaceful domestic music-making, downsized for home and hearth, and nurtured among family and friends. But these comfortable moments in music history never last for long. I suspect that some inherent instability in social psychology or an ineradicable tendency toward cultural restlessness prevents them from defining the soundscapes for more than a few years. Whenever the leaders of the musical mainstream get too soft or introspective, fiercer predators always emerge to dislodge them. I’m convinced that the sweet, sentimental songs that dominated American popular music in the early 1890s, when the insipid waltz “After the Ball” became the best-selling tune in US history, merely built the audience’s hunger for the transgressive sounds of ragtime, jazz, and blues. The craze for romantic torch songs, gentle crooners, and optimistic novelty numbers at the dawn of the Great Depression probably made listeners all the more welcoming when the hot music of the Swing Era arrived in the second half of the 1930s. The same thing happened in the 1950s: the first half of the decade was the golden age of inoffensive pop music, but the second half belonged to irreverent rockers. And it happened again in the 1970s, when the age of nuanced, understated singer-songwriters lasted five years, more or less, before in-your-face punk and shake-your-ass disco took center stage. I hesitate to proclaim some recurring twenty-year cycle, but I can’t deny the evidence for a constant shift of polarities: whenever the musical culture gets too easy and affable, look for a revolution on the horizon.

随着十九世纪中叶的临近，这一变革与真正的革命运动同步到来，1848年欧洲各地爆发了政治动荡。然而，冲突中强烈的民族主义热情使其与以往围绕改革的斗争截然不同。爱国主义之火熊熊燃烧，德国和意大利正在进行的统一运动不仅改变了欧洲的版图，也改变了欧洲的精神和背景音乐。我们对当代的民族主义运动如此熟悉，因此对这一事件的转变并不感到意外。然而，在西方历史上，很少有变化比爱国主义情绪在此时的高涨更出乎意料，也更出乎意料。如果你召集十八、十九世纪欧洲伟大的思想家开会，问他们未来全球政治的驱动力是什么，他们中没有一个人会把民族主义列在名单上。启蒙运动的领袖们预见到了一个理性和普世价值将主导事件进程的时代。马克思和他的同伴们相信阶级斗争和经济压迫将成为变革的动力。奥古斯特·孔德阵营的实证主义者拥护科学和进步，认为它们是未来历史的驱动力。社会达尔文主义者提出了进化模型；政治经济学家将力量归因于亚当·斯密的“看不见的手”；新经院哲学家则将信仰置于上帝之手之上。每个人都有自己的理论。但思想领袖们却无一人预见到未来战争和血腥屠杀将由沙文主义冲动和爱国之心引发。杰出的哲学家们将这些视为过时的部落忠诚，是非理性的情感，对人类社会不再有益，注定要被扫进历史的垃圾堆。但理论家们错了。自1848年以来，世界上没有任何力量比民族主义狂热更强大、更致命、更普遍、更持久。

As the midpoint of the nineteenth century approached, this change arrived in tandem with genuine revolutionary movements as political upheavals broke out across Europe in 1848. But the intensely nationalistic fervor of the conflicts set them apart from previous battles over reform. Patriotism was aflame, and unification movements underway in Germany and Italy changed not only the map of Europe, but also its psyche and soundtrack. We are so familiar with nationalistic movements in our own time that we are hardly surprised by this turn of events. Yet few changes in Western history were less expected and violated more forecasts than the rise of patriotic emotion at this juncture. If you had convened a meeting of the great European thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and asked them what would drive future global politics, not one of them would have put nationalism on the list. The leaders of the Enlightenment anticipated a coming age when reason and universal values would shape the course of events. Marx and his fellow travelers trusted that class struggle and economic oppression would serve as the spur to change. The positivists in the camp of Auguste Comte championed science and progress as the driving force in future history. Social Darwinists postulated evolutionary models; political economists attributed power to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”; and neo-scholastics put faith in the hand of God. Everybody had a theory. But none of the thought leaders anticipated a future when war and bloody carnage would be instigated by chauvinistic impulses and love of country. The illustrious philosophers dismissed those as archaic tribal loyalties, irrational sentiments no longer useful for human society, and destined for the dustbin of history. But the theorists were wrong. No force in the world since 1848 has been more powerful, more deadly, more pervasive, or more persistent than nationalistic zeal.

每当大规模暴力事件发生时，音乐都会被卷入其中。在当时，过热的民族主义成为新的因素，在十九世纪中叶左右撼动了古典音乐界，并在接下来的一百年里持续回响。即便如此，将精心制作的音乐作品作为新武器，在交响乐厅或歌剧院中投入战斗，仍显得有些尴尬。许多学者认为民族主义的兴起是本世纪浪漫主义精神的固有组成部分，但我认为，对狂热爱国主义的诉求应该被视为浪漫主义精神颓废阶段的到来。这场运动已有半个世纪的历史，它需要一些新的因素来为其注入新的活力。贝多芬那种古怪的个人主义，或舒伯特那种忧郁的客厅音乐，都不足以激起时代精神所要求的强烈情感。民族主义运动恰恰为作曲家们提供了他们所需的、也是听众们渴望的新的活力源泉。现在，似乎到了所有优秀作曲家们都应该伸出援手、支援祖国的时候了。

Whenever there is violence on a large scale, music is enlisted in the struggle. In this instance, overheated nationalism was the new ingredient that shook up the classical music establishment around the midpoint of the nineteenth century, and it would reverberate for the next hundred years. Even so, there is something awkward in this new weaponization of well-crafted musical works, destined for combat duty at the symphony hall or opera house. Many scholars see the rise of nationalism as an inherent part of the Romanticist spirit of the century, but I would argue that the appeals to fanatical patriotism should be viewed as the arrival of a decadent stage in the Romanticist ethos. The movement was now half a century old, and it needed some new ingredient to fuel its fires. The eccentric individualism of a Beethoven, or the moody parlor sounds of a Schubert, were no longer sufficient to stir up the powerful emotions that the zeitgeist demanded. The nationalist movements provided precisely that new source of energy composers required—and audiences craved. Now was the time, it seemed, for all good composers to come to the aid of their country.

回想起来，在1848年冲突之前的一百年里，民族主义对古典音乐的影响之小令人震惊。出生于德国的亨德尔可以被称为一位伟大的英国作曲家，但没有人对此大惊小怪。海顿最著名的管弦乐作品被称为“伦敦交响曲”，这更增添了它们的魅力——即使在今天，观众也往往更喜欢这些作品，而不是他所谓的本土奥地利作品。莫扎特选择用意大利语创作歌剧（其中三分之二是用意大利语创作的），用拉丁语创作宗教音乐，包括他的最后一部《安魂曲》，而丝毫不担心这些选择的政治影响。门德尔松，尽管他门德尔松有着犹太血统，却能成为德国乐坛的杰出人物——这在他 1847 年去世后不久是不可能实现的——尽管他最受欢迎的管弦乐作品是苏格兰交响曲、意大利交响曲，以及他为莎士比亚戏剧《仲夏夜之梦》创作的配乐，后者是英国剧作家以希腊为背景的故事。门德尔松自豪地宣称：“我不要民族音乐！一万个魔鬼占尽天下！”德国在那里没有多少必胜的余地。即使当一位德国作曲家被指控与革命有牵连时，比如贝多芬，被指控的效忠对象通常是法国，而不是他的祖国。同样，当贝多芬将自由事业作为《费德里奥》的中心主题时，他把故事背景设定在西班牙，而不是德国。所涉原则比公国更重要^。10

In retrospect, it’s striking how little nationalism had impacted classical music in the hundred years leading up to the conflicts of 1848. Handel, who had been born in Germany, could be proclaimed a great British composer, and no one gave much of a fuss. Haydn’s most famous orchestral works were labeled as the “London Symphonies,” and this only added to their allure—even today, audiences tend to prefer them over his supposedly homegrown Austrian fare. Mozart opted to compose his operas in Italian (two-thirds of them are in that language) and his sacred music in Latin, including his final Requiem, without fretting about the political implications of these choices. Mendelssohn, despite his Jewish roots, could gain renown as the preeminent figure in German music—something that could never have happened shortly after his death in 1847—even though his most popular orchestral works were his Scottish Symphony, his Italian Symphony, and his incidental music for the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a story by a British playwright set in Greece. “No national music for me!” Mendelssohn proudly declared. “Ten thousand devils take all nationality!” Not much scope for German triumphalism there. And even when a German composer was accused of revolutionary affiliations, as in the case of Beethoven, the allegiance imputed was typically to France, not his own homeland. By the same token, when Beethoven made the cause of freedom a central theme of Fidelio, he set the story in Spain, not Germany. The principle at stake was more important than the principality.¹⁰

肖邦是浪漫主义音乐早期倡导者中最明显的异类，他作为一名狂热的波兰民族主义者的活动早于19世纪40年代末的狂热。然而，这种声誉有多少是被一厢情愿的想法所玷污的？肖邦避免参与政治活动，也很难说是一位革命者——尽管他最著名的作品之一被称为“革命练习曲”。（值得注意的是，没有证据表明肖邦将这个绰号用在了这首作品上——而这本身就足以说明这一过程是如何运作的。）他与欧洲贵族关系融洽，无视创作一部伟大的波兰民族歌剧的请求。据说，诗人亚当·密茨凯维奇曾斥责他无视波兰事业，却将自己的才华浪费在为巴黎社会提供娱乐上。即使肖邦融入了波兰音乐传统，例如他的玛祖卡舞曲，这些舞曲在他生前演奏时也未曾带有任何政治意图——事实上，他音乐中深刻的个人化和私密性使其并不适合作为激进民族建设的配乐。细心的学者不得不得出这样的结论：肖邦作为波兰事业的狂热倡导者的传奇，大多是事后强加的。

Chopin is the most obvious outlier among the early exponents of musical Romanticism, his activities as an ardent Polish nationalist predating the fervor of the late 1840s. Yet how much of this reputation has been colored by wishful thinking? Chopin avoided participation in political actions and was hardly a revolutionary—despite the fact that one of his most famous compositions is called the “Revolutionary Etude.” (It’s worth noting that there’s zero evidence that Chopin applied this nickname to the piece—and that, in itself, is a lesson in how this process works.) He had comfortable relationships with European aristocracy and ignored pleas to compose a great national Polish opera. By one account, poet Adam Mickiewicz chastised him for ignoring Polish causes while wasting his talent on providing entertainment for Parisian society. Even when Chopin adopted Polish musical traditions, as in his mazurkas, these were performed during his lifetime without any hint of political intent—indeed, the deeply personal and intimate nature of his music makes it an unsuitable soundtrack for aggressive nation-building. The careful scholar is forced to conclude that the legend of Chopin as a fiery advocate of Polish causes is mostly a construct imposed after the fact.

但音乐与民族主义的关系在 1849 年肖邦去世时发生了剧烈的变化。我们已经可以从德国小说家、美学哲学家弗里德里希·西奥多·菲舍尔（Friedrich Theodor Vischer）1844年做出的沙文主义预言中察觉到新的基调：“德国人终将听到自己伟大的历史以强大的声浪向他涌来……我们想要一个属于我们自己的本土世界，一个民族的音乐世界。” 他并没有等待太久。1850年，将自己的命运视为实现这些民族主义愿望的作曲家理查德·瓦格纳发表了他的文章《音乐中的犹太教》（Das Judenthum in der Musik），这是19世纪音乐评论史上最令人沮丧的文献。当时，瓦格纳因参与1849年德累斯顿起义而流亡苏黎世，在那里他的活动范围从撰写煽动性文章到为革命者提供手榴弹。这篇文章最初以笔名发表，后来以瓦格纳本人的名义重新发表，文章谴责了门德尔松，并断言音乐中的犹太精神无法达到观众对艺术所要求的深刻、振奋人心的精神。甚至在此之前，瓦格纳就已从中世纪德国文学中汲取灵感，创作了《唐豪瑟》（1845 年）和《罗恩格林》（1850 年），这两部歌剧的首演就在作曲家发表反犹太主义小册子的几天前。还在苏黎世时，瓦格纳就开始创作《尼伯龙根的指环》，这部由四部歌剧组成的史诗级系列歌剧至今仍代表着他作品的巅峰，也是西方音乐史上宏大民族主义最具感染力的艺术象征^。11

But the relationship between music and nationalism changed around the time of Chopin’s death in 1849, and with a vengeance. We can already detect the new tone in a chauvinistic prediction that Friedrich Theodor Vischer, a German novelist and philosopher of aesthetics, made in 1844: “The German shall yet hear his own great history surge towards him in mighty waves of sounds.… We want a native world of our own, a national one in music.” He didn’t have long to wait. In 1850, the composer who saw his destiny as the fulfillment of these nationalist aspirations, Richard Wagner, published his article “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (Judaism in music), the most dispiriting document in the history of nineteenth-century music criticism. At the time, Wagner was residing as a political exile in Zurich, a result of his participation in the 1849 uprising in Dresden, where his activities ranged from writing incendiary articles to providing hand grenades for revolutionaries. This essay, originally published under a pseudonym, but later reissued under Wagner’s own name, denounced Mendelssohn and asserted that the Jewish ethos in music was incapable of achieving the profound, uplifting spirit that audiences demand from art. Even before this, Wagner had drawn on medieval German literature for Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850), whose debut took place just a few days before the composer published his anti-Semitic tract. While still in Zurich, Wagner began work on Der Ring des Nibelungen, his epic cycle of four operas that even today represents the high point of his oeuvre and the most charged artistic symbol of grandiose nationalism in the history of Western music.¹¹

我怀疑围绕这些作品的争议永远不会结束。然而，瓦格纳清楚地把握了时代精神和音乐的新方向。几乎每一位在这一时期成长起来的重要作曲家都认同民族主义精神。如果不了解安东宁·德沃夏克（生于1841年）的波西米亚血统，就不可能理解他的音乐贡献；如果不将爱德华·格里格（生于1843年）的音乐贡献置于他对挪威的热爱背景中，就不可能理解他的音乐贡献。尼古拉·里姆斯基-科萨科夫（生于1844年）与俄罗斯、爱德华·埃尔加（1857年）与英国、让·​​西贝柳斯（1865年）与芬兰、曼努埃尔·德·法雅（1876年）与西班牙，或者贝拉·巴托克（1881年）与匈牙利，也是如此。如果我们愿意，还可以举出数十个甚至数百个其他例子。深入挖掘那个时代那些几乎被遗忘的作曲家。但老一辈也参与了这股新涌现的爱国热情。李斯特创作了他的《匈牙利狂想曲》，并出版了《匈牙利的波西米亚人与音乐之父》（1859年），这是一本不成熟的民族音乐学研究著作。当然，在意大利统一过程中发挥了关键作用的狂热民族主义者朱塞佩·威尔第，其爱国热情在歌剧界堪比瓦格纳。

I doubt that the controversy over these works will ever end. Yet Wagner clearly grasped the spirit of the age and the new direction in music. Virtually every significant composer who came of age during this period bought into the nationalistic ethos. It would be impossible to grasp the musical contributions of Antonín Dvořák (born in 1841) without taking stock of his Bohemian heritage, or those of Edvard Grieg (born in 1843) without placing them in the context of his love of Norway. The same is true of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (born in 1844) and Russia; Edward Elgar (1857) and Britain; Jean Sibelius (1865) and Finland; Manuel de Falla (1876) and Spain; or Béla Bartók (1881) and Hungary. Dozens of other examples could be cited, even hundreds, if we were willing to dig into the mostly forgotten composers of the era. But the older generation also participated in this newfound patriotic fervor. Liszt composed his Hungarian Rhapsodies and published Des Bohémiens et de Leur Musique en Hongrie (1859), a half-baked book of ethnomusicological research. And, of course, Giuseppe Verdi, an ardent nationalist who played a key role in the unification of Italy, could match Wagner opera for opera in his patriotic zeal.

威尔第的历史尤其能揭示欧洲音乐的变迁。他1842年的歌剧《纳布科》中的合唱“Va, pensiero”表面上表达了以色列人在巴比伦之囚时期的情感，但它所表达的对失去家园的渴望，也可能是向意大利民族主义者发出的隐晦呼吁。后世以此精神诠释这首歌，也常有故事讲述观众被其爱国情怀所激起，要求立即加演这首激动人心的歌曲。但在这里，如同许多其他情况一样，历史记录被修改以迎合后世的主流意识形态。我们始终应该密切关注最早的资料，这些资料常常被后世的评论家断然否定，但却往往包含着我们关于音乐史最可靠的信息。就威尔第而言，没有证据表明1842年的观众认为这首合唱具有煽动性，甚至没有特别值得关注的地方。他们确实要求在首演时加演，但要唱另一首歌——结束曲《Immenso Jehova》，这是一首赞美上帝的无害而庄严的副歌，没有任何政治色彩。

Verdi’s history casts special light on the shifts underway in European music. The chorus “Va, pensiero,” from his 1842 opera Nabucco, ostensibly represents the sentiments of the Israelites during the Babylonian captivity, but its expressed longing for a lost homeland could also serve as a coded appeal to Italian nationalists. Posterity has dealt with the song in this spirit, and stories have often been told of the audience getting so roused by its patriotic sentiments that they demanded an immediate encore of the stirring anthem. But here, as in so many other instances, the historical record was revised to match the prevailing ideology of a later day. We always do well to pay close attention to the earliest sources, which are too often dismissed out of hand by later commentators, yet often contain our most reliable information about the history of music. In the case of Verdi, there is no evidence that audiences in 1842 saw this chorus as inflammatory, or even as particularly noteworthy. They did demand an encore at the debut performance, but of a different song—the closing hymn “Immenso Jehova,” an innocuous and solemn refrain in praise of God, and lacking any political overtones.

然而，谣言和传说往往比事实更有影响力。“Va, pensiero”（我，沉思者）的象征意义如此之大，以至于1901年，米兰一半的人口在作曲家的葬礼队伍中，在街道两旁齐声唱起如今已成名的合唱，这是民众起义和团结的真实例子，超越了歌剧院上演的任何作品。你可以在威尔第后期的歌剧中寻找线索和象征，将它们解读为政治文献——有些歌剧，例如1849年的《莱尼亚诺之战》，其爱国情绪显而易见，而另一些歌剧则将其论战意图（如果有的话）隐藏得很好。然而，威尔第作为民族主义者的形象并不需要深通过文本分析来激发公众的想象力。一些崇拜者甚至认为他的名字是一个神秘的护身符，应该被视为维托里奥·埃马努埃莱（Vittorio Emanuele，Re D'Italia）的缩写，即意大利统一后的国王。甚至迷信也被用作修正主义音乐史的论据。

Yet rumors and legends often have more influence than facts. “Va, pensiero” took on such symbolic force that half the population of Milan lined the streets and sang the now-famous chorus for the composer’s funeral procession in 1901, a real-life example of popular uprising and unity beyond anything ever staged in an opera house. You can search through Verdi’s later operas for clues and symbols, interpreting them as political documents—some, such as La Battaglia di Legnano (1849), make their patriotic sentiments obvious, while others keep their polemical intent, if any, well hidden. Yet the image of Verdi as a nationalist didn’t need deep textual analysis to capture the public’s imagination. Some admirers actually believed that his name was a mystical talisman, and should be viewed as an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele, Re D’Italia, the King of Italy following the nation’s unification. Even superstition was enlisted as a prop for revisionist music history.

瓦格纳和威尔第的例子已被广泛研究、辩论、诠释和重新诠释。然而，一个更耐人寻味的心理学问题却鲜有人探讨：为什么在十九世纪初，那些如此骄傲自大、抵制皇室和国家干预的作曲家，在十九世纪末期却甘愿沦为权力掮客的棋子？我们在本书中追溯了作曲家作为局外人这一反复出现的形象，并见证了这种棘手的独立性如何催生了如此多的创新。因此，我们必须停下来思考，究竟是什么样的特殊境遇，让十九世纪末二十世纪初最具影响力的音乐家们沦为如此迎合政权的托儿。即使在现代主义时代，像阿诺德·勋伯格和伊戈尔·斯特拉文斯基这样的作曲家也扭转了这一趋势，成为政治流亡者——讽刺的是，这很像早年的瓦格纳，只不过他们处于意识形态光谱的另一端，如今正逃避其继任者所信奉的价值观——将民族认同赋予音乐家的观念依然存在。近来，每每谈论德米特里·肖斯塔科维奇，几分钟就会提到斯大林的名字。翻阅任何关于阿隆·科普兰的记载，你都会在开头几句中发现一些对美国文化的提及。在音乐迅速在网络上传播并跨越国界的今天，我愿意相信我们终于摆脱了这种简化主义的态度。在地球村，作曲家寻求的是全球听众的青睐，而不是一份无偿的国家发言人工作或独裁者的赞许。希望这种情况能够持续下去。然而，是什么让晚期浪漫主义作曲家们如此愿意玩这种游戏，以一种我们难以想象巴赫、莫扎特或贝多芬的方式讨好权力呢？

The cases of Wagner and Verdi have been extensively studied, debated, interpreted, and reinterpreted. Yet the more interesting psychological question has rarely been addressed: Why did composers, so prideful and resistant to the meddling of royalty and state at the dawn of the nineteenth century, become willing pawns for power brokers before its close? We have traced the recurring figure of the composer as outsider in these pages, and seen how this prickly independence has fueled so much innovation. So we must stop and ask what unusual circumstances turned the most influential musicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into such accommodating shills for regimes. Even in the modernist era, when composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky reversed that trend and became political exiles—ironically, much like Wagner in an earlier day, but on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, now escaping from the values his successors espoused—the idea of attaching national identities to musicians continued. In recent times, no discussion of Dmitri Shostakovich can last more than a few minutes without the name of Stalin entering the conversation. Track down any account of Aaron Copland, and you will find some reference to Americana within the first few sentences. I would like to believe that we have finally broken out of this reductionist attitude in the current day, when music goes viral on the web and crosses borders in a heartbeat. In the global village, composers seek the favor of a worldwide audience, not an unpaid job as national spokesperson or pats on the back from a dictator. Let’s hope that continues. Yet what made the composers of late-stage Romanticism so willing to play that game in the first place, cozying up to power in a way that we can hardly envision with Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven?

这种转变与其说是社会政治的，不如说是心理上的，而且是潜移默化的。19世纪40年代之前，音乐家通过他们服务于权贵——即便从中获益，也反抗着自己仆从的角色。他们对轻​​蔑甚至臆想的轻蔑都感到恼火，并经常密谋如何钻体制的空子，操纵国家统治者以达到自己的艺术目的。这种态度，尽管偶尔有些琐碎，却创造了一种良性张力，激励着这些艺术家创作出许多人类历史上最伟大的杰作。作曲家可以身为局内人，同时又保留着局外人那种易怒的独立性。但瓦格纳和威尔第的出现，催生了一种新的艺术家心理模式。他们不再视自己为国家服务，而是相信自己代表着国家。他们视自己为时代最强大运动的化身，这种观念满足了他们的自尊心，并激发了他们的自豪感，其程度之高在世俗音乐史上前所未有。这标志着一场深刻的变革。赞助人和艺术家之间的创作张力被打破，不再存在任何妥协。最终的结果只能是艺术浮夸、铺张浪费，自诩为世界重要——自我膨胀，不受制约。我们至今仍用“瓦格纳式”来形容这类艺术作品，这绝非偶然。

The shift was psychological even more than sociopolitical, and it was insidious. Before the 1840s, musicians became insiders by serving the powerful—but even as they reaped the benefits, they rebelled against their role as servants. They chafed at slights, even imagined ones, and often schemed at how to game the system, manipulating the rulers of nations for their own artistic purposes. This attitude, for all its occasional pettiness, created a healthy tension, spurring these artists to produce many of the greatest masterworks in human history. The composer could be an insider while retaining the irritable independence of the outsider. But a new psychological model of the artist emerged with Wagner and Verdi. They no longer saw themselves as serving the nation; instead, they believed they represented the nation. They saw themselves as embodying the most powerful movement of their time, and this notion gratified their egos and inflamed their pride to a degree previously unknown in the annals of secular music. This marked a profound change. The creative tension between patron and artist was broken. There was no give-and-take. The end result could only be an art marked by grandiosity, extravagance, and self-proclaimed world significance—ego flourishing without check or balance. It’s hardly a coincidence that we still use the term Wagnerian to describe artistic works of this sort.

我们如今的音乐仍然承载着这些声音中蕴含的侵略性民族主义的重压。我曾对暴力电影的配乐进行过调查，可以证明，屏幕上的杀戮数量越高，背景音乐就越有可能借鉴19世纪浪漫主义作曲家的音色。即使电影发生在中世纪或中土世界，你仍然需要贝多芬、马勒和瓦格纳的音乐来激励战斗人员。在许多第一人称射击游戏中都能听到类似的声音——即使你在追捕纳粹分子（这多少有点自相矛盾），你仍然似乎能从令人振奋的日耳曼风格音乐中受益。即使这个时期的管弦乐作品被重新包装成供高雅人士欣赏的低俗音乐，它仍然蕴含着某种渴望鲜血的东西^。12

Our current-day music still carries the weight of the aggressive nationalism embedded in these sounds. I’ve done a survey of the soundtracks to violent movies, and can attest that the higher the onscreen kill count, the more likely it is that the background music borrows from the sonic palette of the nineteenth-century Romanticist composers. Even if the film takes place in the Middle Ages or Middle Earth, you still want a dose of Beethoven, Mahler, and Wagner to stir up the combatants. Similar sounds can be heard in many first-person shooter video games—even when (somewhat paradoxically) you are hunting down Nazis, you still apparently benefit from uplifting Germanic-sounding music as accompaniment. Long after the orchestral works of this period got repackaged as effete music for highbrows, there’s still something about it that calls for blood.¹²

诺贝尔奖得主埃利亚斯·卡内蒂是一位对人类弱点进行深入思考的思想家，他关注的是在他影响深远的著作《群众与权力》中，卡内蒂试图以管弦乐队指挥的身份应对二十世纪破坏性的民粹主义运动。在卡内蒂看来，这位音乐大师展现出的性格特征与那些煽动民众、站在最前线挥舞指挥棒、让其他人去做脏活的操纵型领导人的性格特征如出一辙。尽管卡内蒂没有点名提及任何一位音乐家，但他对这些煽动家的描述几乎可以出自瓦格纳著名的指挥论著。瓦格纳在书中赞扬了权威、坚定、自信、个人力量、活力以及对绝对服从的坚持——这些特质与暴君和独裁者的心理特征如出一辙。可悲的是：瓦格纳很可能是在描述他自己^。13

I’m not surprised that the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, a deep thinker on matters of human frailty, focused on the example of the orchestra conductor when trying to come to grips with destructive populist movements of the twentieth century in his seminal book Crowds and Power. For Canetti, the musical maestro reveals the same personality traits found in manipulative leaders who incite the populace, standing in the forefront and waving the baton while others do the dirty work. And though Canetti doesn’t mention any musician by name, his descriptions of these demagogues could almost be taken out of the pages of Wagner’s famous treatise on conducting. Here Wagner praises authority, firmness, self-confidence, personal power, energy, and an insistence on absolute obedience—the exact same ingredients found in the psychological profiles of tyrants and dictators. The sad truth: Wagner was probably describing himself.¹³

关于瓦格纳是否参与了这种过度民族命运意识所导致的血腥屠杀后果的争论或许永无止境。艺术作品的价值与人类苦难之间不存在任何平衡公式。这种等式根本不存在，也永远不会存在。我们在评价罗曼·波兰斯基、伍迪·艾伦、迈克尔·杰克逊或其他被指控犯有罪行和虐待行为的艺术家时，处理的也是同样的问题，尽管方式和尺度不同。我们可以尝试用艺术的视角来评价艺术，用道德和伦理的视角来评价人。但在很多情况下，这些罪行似乎毒害了艺术性，阻碍了任何细微的区分。这本身就是浪漫主义的遗产：艺术家的作品与生平混为一谈。就瓦格纳而言，艺术本身或许点燃了毁灭性的民族自豪感，导致了日后诸多恐怖事件的发生。至少，它被用来为这些未来的越轨行为合法化——这灾难性地证明了音乐的力量及其被滥用的用途，而这正是本书的重点。我将留给其他人去权衡这类事情的利弊。我不认为在这些情况下存在一个有效的尺度，或者任何合理的平衡点。

The debate over Wagner’s complicity in the bloody and genocidal results of this overweening sense of national destiny will probably never end. There is no formula for balancing the value of an artistic work against human suffering. That equation simply doesn’t exist and never will. It’s the same issue we deal with, albeit in different ways and on a different scale, when assessing Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, or other artists accused of crimes and abuses. We can try to evaluate the art on artistic terms, and the human being on moral and ethical ones. But in many instances, the offenses seem to poison the artistry, preventing any such fine distinctions. That in itself is a legacy of Romanticism: the notion that the artist’s works and biography blend together. In Wagner’s case, the art itself may have inflamed the destructive national pride that caused many horrors to come. At a minimum, it was used to legitimize these future transgressions—a catastrophic testimony to the powers and perverse repurposings of music that are a major focus of this book. I will leave it to others to weigh the trade-offs in such matters. I don’t believe there’s a scale that works in these cases, or any balance that makes sense.

但这里有重要的教训，对这段颠覆性历史的总体目标至关重要。当我告诉人们音乐与暴力密切相关——这也是本书的关键主题——时，他们常常会立即拒绝——也许是因为这种联系似乎玷污了他们与挚爱的……歌曲。又或许是因为他们感到自己容易被旋律所说服。但回想一下，开启整个西方音乐正典传统的第一个词是“愤怒”：“愤怒——女神，唱出珀琉斯之子阿喀琉斯的愤怒，杀人的，注定要灭亡的”，这是荷马史诗《伊利亚特》令人不安的开场白。而愤怒从未停止。历史上每一个暴力团体都有其激励人心的歌曲，无论是纳粹和瓦格纳，查尔斯·曼森的杀人团队和披头士的歌曲《Helter Skelter》，还是其他嗜血团体自古以来就使用的赞歌。或许在这些情况下，我们可以将其描述为对音乐的滥用。但歌曲和流血之间的联系依然存在，而且这种联系在未来还会像过去一样存在^。14

But there are important lessons here, crucial to the overarching goals of this subversive history. When I tell people that music is closely connected to violence, a key theme in these pages, they often reject the notion out of hand—perhaps because such a linkage seems to taint their own intimate relationship with favorite songs. Or perhaps because they sense their own vulnerability to the persuasion of the melodies. But recall that the first word that set in motion the whole canonic tradition of Western music is “rage”: “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed,” is the disturbing opening to Homer’s Iliad. And the rage has never stopped. Every violent group in history has its motivating songs, whether it is the Nazis and Wagner, Charles Manson’s killing crew and the Beatles song “Helter Skelter,” or any of the other anthems that bloodthirsty groups have used since time immemorial. Perhaps in these cases, we could describe it as the misuse of music. But the connection between song and bloodshed remains, and it will exist in the future just as it has in the past.¹⁴

想想那些我们习以为常的歌曲中蕴含的象征性暴力，无论是运动队的“战斗”歌曲，还是看似天真的童谣，例如《Ring Around the Rosie》或《London Bridge Is Falling Down》，它们都带有令人毛骨悚然的色彩，并以牺牲者为主题。从任何客观的历史标准来看，音乐都是最暴力的艺术形式，最接近可怕行径发生时的场景。画家和诗人通常等到战斗结束后才去歌颂战争，这是有原因的，但音乐家们实际上却被邀请走上战场，手持小号或鼓，参与这场屠杀。

Consider the symbolic violence embedded in a wide range of songs that we take for granted, whether sports team ‘fight’ songs or seemingly innocent children’s melodies, such as “Ring Around the Rosie,” or “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” with their macabre overtones and sacrificial victims. From any objective historical standard, music is the most violent art form, the closest to the action when terrible deeds are done. There’s a reason why painters and poets usually wait to celebrate warfare until the combat is finished, but musicians are actually invited onto the battlefield, trumpet or drum in hand, to participate in the carnage.

正因如此，我们才探究音乐民族主义的兴起及其破坏性后果。我们必须承认，这并非文化史上的异常现象，并非奇特之举，亦非昙花一现。音乐是一股强大的力量，其威力远超我们的想象——尤其是在这个时代，人们把歌曲视为一种无聊的娱乐，或者更平庸、更误导性的大脑刺激，也就是哈佛大学哲学家史蒂芬·平克所说的“听觉芝士蛋糕”。平克教授，这真是个致命的芝士蛋糕！¹⁵

And this is why we probe into the rise of musical nationalism and its destructive aftermath. We need to acknowledge that this isn’t an aberration in cultural history, a peculiarity, or a onetime event. Music is a mighty force, possessing far more potency than we give it credit for—especially in an age that treats songs as idle entertainment, or, even more banal and misguided, as a kind of brain stimulation, what the Harvard philosopher Steven Pinker calls “auditory cheesecake.” That is some deadly cheesecake, Professor Pinker!¹⁵

音乐作为变革推动者的效力是惊人的。歌曲一次又一次地被当作武器，任何一部音乐史如果忽略了这一章，都是极其不完整的。政治理论家迈克尔·沃尔泽甚至声称，1918-1919年的德国革命注定失败，因为“它没有一首歌”，而俄国布尔什维克则对《国际歌》进行了残酷而有效的运用。他的他的校友托德·吉特林认为，自柏林墙倒塌以来，共产主义中缺失的要素是“一种挥之不去的旋律”。在其他情况下，这种旋律的能量可能是中性的，甚至是善意的理想主义。我们可以用这样的想法来安慰自己：每一个拥有足够多追随者的和平乌托邦计划，也都有其偏爱的曲调，无论是震教徒和他们的赞美诗，还是圣西门社会主义者——他们邀请《马赛曲》的作曲家克劳德·约瑟夫·鲁日·德·莱尔创作一首歌曲来激励合作劳动。无论是激进的还是乌托邦的，音乐都有力量，我们忽视它的力量，后果自负^。16

Music’s efficacy as a change agent is savage. Songs are weaponized, again and again, and any history of music that leaves out this chapter is woefully incomplete. Political theorist Michael Walzer has gone so far as to claim that the German Revolution of 1918–1919 was doomed because “it did not have a song,” while the Bolsheviks in Russia made brutally effective use of “The Internationale.” His former student Todd Gitlin suggests that the missing ingredient in communism since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been “a melody you can’t get out of your head.” In other cases, this melodic energy can be neutral or even good-naturedly idealistic, and we can console ourselves with the thought that every peaceful utopian scheme with a sufficient number of followers also has its favored tunes, whether it is the Shakers and their hymns or the Saint-Simonian socialists, who enlisted the composer of the “Marseillaise,” Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, to write a song to inspire cooperative labor. In either case, militant or utopian, music has power, and we ignore its force at our own peril.¹⁶

19

19

大逆转

The Great Flip-Flop

大多数人认为，民间音乐与我们在莫扎特、贝多芬、威尔第、瓦格纳和其他精英作曲家作品中所见的截然相反。更重要的是，民间音乐的狂热爱好者正是因为这个原因才拥抱它。民间音乐打破了等级制度，对抗精英体制，并为那些永远无法在拜罗伊特或斯卡拉大剧院获得平台的边缘群体发声。至少，这是民间音乐处处体现的营销信息，它使民间音乐合法化，并确立了其真实性的可信度。

Most people assume that folk music stands for the opposite of everything we have just encountered with Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner, and other elite composers. Even more to the point, ardent fans of folk music embrace it for that very reason. Folk music breaks down hierarchies, opposes elite institutions, and gives a voice to marginalized groups who would never get a platform at Bayreuth or La Scala. At least that’s the marketing message accompanying this music at every turn, legitimizing it and establishing its credentials of authenticity.

然而，民间音乐收藏家——那些在乡间寻觅口耳相传的歌曲的温和爱好者——的兴起，恰逢这些著名作曲家蓬勃发展的时期。同样的主流文化力量塑造了这场运动，并产生了类似的结果。正如民族主义情绪激发了瓦格纳和威尔第的创作一样，它们也激发了人们对民间音乐的兴趣，不久之后，民族自豪感和种族纯洁性的意识形态就被融入到哪怕是最简单的歌曲中。许多音乐家参与了这场爱国运动，但一位哲学家因其理论贡献而获得了最大的赞誉。基础。约翰·戈特弗里德·赫尔德（1744-1803）曾有句名言：“人类的一切完美都具有民族性”——在他看来，这一理念涵盖了所有艺术领域，尤其是诗歌和音乐。赫尔德嘲讽阶级差异，将真实性置于“人民”（Volk）的范畴，即涵盖国家中每个人的群体，从国王到最卑微的农民^。1

Yet the rise of folk music collectors—those gentle enthusiasts who scour the countryside searching for songs handed down by oral tradition—took place during the same period when these famous composers flourished. The same prevailing cultural forces shaped this movement, and with similar results. Just as nationalistic sentiments inspired Wagner and Verdi, they also spurred interest in folk music, and it didn’t take long before a whole ideology of national pride and racial purity got loaded onto even the simplest songs. Many musicians participated in this patriotic program, but a philosopher gets most of the credit for providing its theoretical underpinnings. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) famously declared that “every human perfection is national”—a decree that included all artistic endeavors, in his view, but especially poetry and music. Herder derided class distinctions and situated the locus of authenticity in the Volk (the folk), a group that encompassed every individual in the nation, from the king to the lowliest peasant.¹

赫尔德发表其观点之际，欧洲顶尖作曲家们正享受着名人效应带来的初步好处，并寻求摆脱教会和国家束缚的独立性。在这一阶段，古典音乐中日益增长的个人崇拜和对民间音乐新发现的兴趣，都具有民主化和反权威性。赫尔德去世于拿破仑称帝前一年，在他生前，这种对“人民”的理想化与铁腕专制主义的冲动几乎没有关联。相反，这位哲学家的情感使他与颠覆性的平等主义事业结盟。有些人对赫尔德晚年支持法国革命运动感到惊讶；对于一个与德国爱国主义如此紧密相连的人来说，这种观点或许有些奇怪。然而，赫尔德打破等级制度、赋予下层阶级权力的愿望，与他推崇民歌的世界观是一致的。与古典音乐一样，民歌运动后来也被专制爱国者所吸收。但这需要时间。我们看到一个耳熟能详的故事：大众音乐沦为权贵的道具。如果我们不理解这种转变的动态，就无法理解19世纪和20世纪民间音乐运动背后的诡异骗局。

Herder published his views at the same time that the leading composers of Europe were enjoying the first perks of celebrity and seeking ways to assert their independence from church and state. At this stage, both movements—the growing cult of personality in classical music and the newfound interest in folk music—were democratizing and anti-authoritarian. Herder died a year before Napoleon declared himself emperor, and during his lifetime this idealization of the Volk had little connection with iron-fisted authoritarian impulses. Rather, the philosopher’s sentiments aligned him with disruptive, egalitarian causes. Some are surprised that Herder supported the revolutionary movement in France in his later years; this is a strange view, one might think, for an individual so closely linked to German patriotism. Yet Herder’s desire to break down hierarchies and empower the lower classes was part of the same worldview that led him to celebrate the folk song. Like classical music, the folk song movement later got co-opted by authoritarian patriots. But that took time. Here we have a familiar story: the music of the masses gets turned into a prop for the powerful. If we don’t grasp the dynamics of this shift, we won’t understand the whole bizarre charade of the folk music movement as it unfolded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

我指的是民间音乐运动——一个由收藏家、作曲家和其他同谋者组成的松散联盟，他们试图将普通民众的歌曲提升到更严肃的境界——并将其与音乐本身进行对比。这两者常常被混淆，使其变得模糊和神秘，而非清晰。一些评论家对前者深恶痛绝，以至于他们愿意放弃后者。戴夫·哈克在他颇具争议的著作《假歌》（Fakesong）中——一本谴责民间音乐虚伪的宣言——甚至宣称“概念就像民歌和民谣一样，它们是知识分子的废墟。”他还补充道，试图“恢复这些概念”是“没有意义的”。它们是概念上的废物，必须淘汰。”我很难责怪哈克，尽管他将合理的批评推向了荒谬的极端。正如我们将看到的，民歌运动提供了太多关于虚假意识、机构出卖、向强者卑躬屈膝和彻头彻尾的欺骗的案例研究——事实上，一切都与该类型公众形象中推崇的纯洁和天真背道而驰。但这就是为什么我们必须将其与民间音乐本身区分开来，民间音乐在歌曲收藏家和理论家开始将他们的教条强加于它之前已经繁荣了数千年^。2

I refer to the folk music movement—that loosely organized coalition of collectors, composers, and other co-conspirators who seek to elevate the songs of the common people into something more serious—and contrast it to the music itself. These two have often been confounded in ways that obscure and mystify rather than illuminate. Some commentators have been so disgusted by the former that they are willing to abandon the latter. Dave Harker, in his controversial book Fakesong—a kind of manifesto denouncing the phoniness of folk music—goes so far as to proclaim that “concepts like folksong and ballad are intellectual rubble.” He adds that there is “no point” to the attempts “to rehabilitate such concepts. They are conceptual lumber and have to go.” I can hardly blame Harker, even though he pushes legitimate criticisms to ridiculous extremes. The folk song movement, as we shall see, provides far too many case studies in false consciousness, institutional sell-out, kowtowing to the powerful, and out-and-out duplicity—indeed, everything opposed to the purity and innocence celebrated in the genre’s public image. But that’s why we must distinguish it from the folk music itself, which flourished for thousands of years before song collectors and theoreticians began imposing their dogmas on it.²

民歌是如何失去其纯真性的？让我们来一一列举。几乎所有参与民歌产业崛起的人都另有目的，通常是隐秘的。以下至少有十个民歌影响了——甚至经常被扭曲——那些本应源于平民百姓、纯净如山泉的歌曲。首先，我们看到的是民歌被操纵以推进民族主义议程。一些教育机构甚至坚持使用“国歌”而非“民歌”，并篡改传统音乐书籍，插入充满被认可的爱国情怀的新作，并将它们传播给学生。接下来，我们将看到：民歌被推广为怀旧保守主义的工具，唤起美好的旧时光和朴实的价值观。第三种情况则遭到了反击，他们推广民歌作为进步政治的推动力，宣扬阶级意识、抗议和反叛的歌曲。随后，第四个势力出现了，古典音乐界以其精明的功利主义理念，试图利用民间旋律来振兴音乐厅，并经常编造荒诞的故事来助长这一进程。（安东宁·德沃夏克的《新世界交响曲》就是一个很好的例子：在这部作品首演时，作曲家告诉媒体，他在乐谱中没有使用任何美国民间旋律——他甚至嘲笑这个故事是无稽之谈和谎言——然而，这种虚假信息至今仍在传播，因为它有助于营销。）但街头在我们警方的犯罪名单中，第五类是歌手和商业艺人，他们有着完全相同的想法，只是他们想用这些歌曲来激发大众的民谣音乐。第六类人将民谣音乐视为一个新的知识研究领域，可以支持学术生涯并获得舒适的终身职位。另外三个派系将这些歌曲视为令人振奋的配乐，象征着对更纯粹生活的乌托邦式愿景；或是文化真实性的标尺；或是利用音乐行业的热门趋势赚钱的一种方式。我们不要忘记另一类人，那些温柔的歌迷，他们庆祝和分享民谣，因为……嗯，我想他们喜欢听民谣。

How did folk songs lose their innocence? Let’s count the ways. Almost everyone involved in the rise of the folk song business had an agenda, usually a hidden one, and here are at least ten that influenced—and frequently distorted—songs that supposedly sprang up wholesome and unadulterated from the common people, pure as a mountain spring. First we encounter the manipulation of folk songs to advance a nationalist agenda. Some in the educational establishment even insisted on using the term “national songs” instead of “folk songs,” and mangled books of traditional music, inserting recent compositions filled with approved patriotic sentiments and disseminating them to schoolchildren. Next on our list: the promotion of folk songs as a tool of nostalgic conservatism, evoking good old days and homespun values. These were countered by a third group, made up of those who promoted folk music as a spur to progressive politics, promulgating songs of class-consciousness, protest, and rebellion. Then came a fourth, the classical music establishment with its shrewdly utilitarian notions for employing folk melodies to revitalize the concert hall, often concocting tall tales to help in the process. (Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony is a telling example: at the time of the work’s premiere, the composer told the press that he didn’t use a single American folk melody in its score—he even derided the story as nonsense and a lie—and yet that disinformation is still spread today because it makes for good marketing.) But the street singers and commercial entertainers, fifth in our police lineup of culprits, had the exact same idea, only they wanted to use these songs to energize populist music for the masses. A sixth contingent saw folk music as a new field of intellectual study that could support academic careers and secure comfortable, tenured jobs. And three other factions looked to these songs as uplifting soundtracks to a utopian vision of a purer life; or as a measuring rod for cultural authenticity; or as a way of making money with a hot trend in the music business. And let’s not forget one more contingent, those gentle fans who celebrated and shared folk songs because… well, I guess they enjoyed listening to them.

我们应该特别关注最后这一群体，仅仅因为这些音乐爱好者似乎怀有最纯粹的动机。然而，对享乐的追求可能比其他所有目的加起来还要多，导致了更多的操纵和伪造。为了帮助歌曲迅速走红（甚至在互联网出现之前），各个派系都努力让老歌更悦耳——这一追求导致了无数的文本篡改、旋律改变和虚假故事。“他或许对我们说了谎，但他给了我们好歌”，这是一个典型的辩解，正如民谣音乐史学家史蒂夫·鲁德在评价AL·劳埃德（20世纪中叶传统音乐的主要倡导者之一）时指出的那样。劳埃德对音乐抱有激进的政治意图，但他明白，如果这些歌曲得不到主流听众的认可，他的努力将无果而终。 “与其说他经常重写和修改歌曲，使它们更容易传唱，或是为了迎合复兴运动的目的和利益，”罗德指出，“不如说他从未明确（有人会说从未诚实）说明他修改的程度。” 因此，劳埃德留下了毕生的研究成果，但谁知道其中有多少是可信的呢？³

We ought to pay particularly close attention to this last group, if only because these music lovers seem to have the purist motives of the lot. Yet the quest for enjoyment may have led to more manipulation and falsification than all the other agendas put together. In their zeal to help songs go viral (even before the Internet), various factions strived to make old tunes more enjoyable—a quest that led to countless altered texts, changed melodies, and bogus stories. “He may have told us lies but he gave us good songs,” was a typical justification, as folk music historian Steve Roud points out in his assessment of A. L. Lloyd, one of the leading advocates for traditional music in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Lloyd had an aggressive political agenda for the music, but he understood that this would go nowhere if the songs weren’t embraced by a mainstream audience. “It is not so much that he rewrote and altered songs to make them more singable or to suit the purposes and interests of the Revival, as he frequently did,” Roud notes, “but that he was never clear (some would say never honest) about the extent of his tinkering.” As a result, Lloyd left behind a lifetime of research, but who knows how much of it can be believed?³

然而，这并非个例。即使在赫尔德的时代，对“改进”民间音乐的热情也淹没了精准记录民间音乐的运动。约瑟夫·里森（1752-1803）很少被提及为该领域的英雄，但他之所以树敌最多，仅仅是因为他想要确保民谣歌曲集的准确性。然而，他在同时代人中的声誉却是：沃尔特·斯科特 (Walter Scott) 的抱怨最能体现这一点：“每当看到两份传统歌曲或民谣的拷贝时，里森总是固执地选择最差的一份作为最真实的。” ⁴

Yet this was no isolated example. Even back in Herder’s day, the zeal for ‘improving’ folk music overwhelmed the movement to document it accurately. Joseph Ritson (1752–1803) is rarely mentioned among the heroes of the field, but he made most of his enemies merely because he wanted to ensure the accuracy of folk songbooks. Yet his reputation among his contemporaries was that of a spoilsport, and is best conveyed by Walter Scott’s gripe: “Whenever presented with two copies of a traditional song or ballad, Ritson perversely chose the worse as the most genuine.”⁴

我们不得不得出这样的结论：即使是民谣运动的创始人也常常担心这些歌曲在自然状态下过于枯燥乏味。几年后，作曲家康斯坦特·兰伯特（Constant Lambert）用一句讽刺的俏皮话总结了这一观点：“民歌的麻烦之处在于，一旦你演奏完，除了一遍又一遍地演奏，并且声音更大之外，你几乎无能为力。”兰伯特还写了一首押韵的诗，直指拉尔夫·沃恩·威廉姆斯（Ralph Vaughan Williams）受民谣影响的古典作品，其中“乡巴佬和三和弦/都由三和弦代表”。然而，即使是兰伯特，他的作品也受到了民粹音乐的影响，他的品味也非常包容——他是最早赞美爵士乐的主流作曲家之一，并且早在20世纪30年代初就认识到了艾灵顿公爵（Duke Ellington）的重要性。但令人悲伤的事实是，民谣最狂热的拥护者往往是对自己音乐进行修改的最严重的违规者^。5

We are forced to conclude that even the people who created the folk music movement often feared that these songs were too boring in their natural state. Some years later, composer Constant Lambert would sum up this view in a cruel quip: “The whole trouble with a folk-song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder.” Lambert also penned a rhyming insult directed at Ralph Vaughan Williams’s folk-influenced classical works, in which “both yokels and driads / are represented by triads.” Nevertheless, even Lambert was influenced by populist music in his own work, and very inclusive in his tastes—he was one of the first establishment composers to praise jazz, and he recognized the importance of Duke Ellington back in the early 1930s. But the sad truth here is that the most ardent champions of the Volk were often the worst offenders in tinkering with their music.⁵

诗歌的放纵有时会走向极端，沦为诗歌骗局。事实上，那个时代最大的文学丑闻就是由一位名叫奥西安的凯尔特诗人的营销引发的。苏格兰诗人詹姆斯·麦克弗森在十八世纪六十年代因翻译奥西安的史诗作品而蜚声国际。这些作品此前鲜为人知，如今却在读者中掀起了一股类似哈利·波特的狂热。奥西安的粉丝包括拿破仑（据说他曾将史诗带入战场）和托马斯·杰斐逊（他称赞这位虚构的诗人是人类历史上最伟大的诗人）。杰斐逊甚至宣布他计划学习盖尔语，以便能够阅读奥西安的原著。

Poetic license sometimes went to such extremes that it turned into poetic fraud. In fact, the biggest literary scandal of the era was stirred up by the marketing of a nonexistent Celtic bard named Ossian. The Scottish poet James Macpherson gained international fame in the 1760s as the translator of Ossian’s epic works, previously unknown texts that now set off a kind of Harry Potter–style mania among readers. Ossian’s fans included Napoleon, who allegedly carried the epic poetry into battle, and Thomas Jefferson, who praised the imagined bard as the greatest poet in human history. Jefferson even announced his plan of learning Gaelic so he could read Ossian in the original.

但真有原作吗？学者们很快注意到这些作品在文本、年代和神话传说方面存在问题，这削弱了麦克弗森关于它们出自一位三世纪诗人之手的说法。尽管承诺分享资料，麦克弗森从未出示过原始手稿。大多数专家最终得出结论，这些手稿并不存在。麦克弗森只是根据民间传说、故事和诗歌的片段，拼凑了奥西安的作品。任何涉及的文学技巧都出自他本人，而非某个早已逝去的神话吟游诗人。或许，如果他承认了这一点，他的声誉就不会遭受如此沉重的打击。相反，麦克弗森被人们铭记为十八世纪末最大胆的文学骗子。

But was there an original? Scholars soon noted textual, chronological, and mythological problems with these works that undercut Macpherson’s claim that they had been written by a third-century poet. Despite promises that he would share his sources, Macpherson never produced the original manuscripts. Most experts eventually concluded they didn’t exist. Macpherson had constructed Ossian’s work out of bits and pieces of folklore, tales, and poems. Any literary skill involved was his own, not that of a mythical long-dead bard. Perhaps if he had admitted as much, his reputation wouldn’t have taken such a heavy hit. Instead, Macpherson is remembered as the most audacious literary con artist of the late eighteenth century.

但从十八世纪六十年代开始的半个多世纪里，许多音乐和艺术界的领军人物都陷入了对莪相的狂热——即使面临造假指控，这种热情依然不减。舒伯特为莪相的诗歌谱曲，其中引用的译文非常糟糕，演奏时引人发笑。门德尔松访问苏格兰，这激发了他创作一些最著名的作品——尽管他抱怨传统凯尔特音乐粗俗，还让他牙痛——而这部分是受到他对莪相的热爱所激发的。但最耐人寻味的回应来自赫尔德，我们热忱的民歌运动之父。这位哲学家对麦克弗森的发现表现出极大的热情，他认为这是对他倡导德国人民及其崇高音乐的支持，并否认了所有造假指控。 “奥西安的诗是歌曲，是人民的歌曲，是民歌，是淳朴、贴近感官的人民的歌曲，是长期通过口头传统传承下来的歌曲，”他宣称。赫尔德最终总结道：“麦克弗森不可能发明这种东西。这种诗歌不可能在本世纪创作出来。” ⁶

But for more than half a century, starting in the 1760s, many of the leading figures in music and the arts got caught up in the Ossian mania—an enthusiasm that continued even in the face of allegations of fraud. Schubert set Ossian’s poetry to music, drawing on translations that were so bad they provoked laughter when performed. Mendelssohn’s visit to Scotland, which inspired some of his most famous works—although he griped that traditional Celtic music was vulgar and gave him a toothache—was spurred in part by his enthusiasm for Ossian. But the most intriguing response came from Herder, our fervent father of the folk song movement. The philosopher expressed gushing enthusiasm for Macpherson’s discovery, which he saw as a support for his advocacy of the Volk and their sublime music, and denied all charges of fakery. “Ossian’s poems are songs, songs of the people, folksongs, the songs of an unsophisticated people living close to the senses, songs which have been long handed down by oral tradition,” he declared. Herder’s final conclusion: “Macpherson could not possibly have invented something of this kind. Poetry of this kind could not possibly have been composed in this century.”⁶

这些话里有很多值得解读的地方，几乎全都令人不快。就在民间音乐逐渐成为学术研究的严肃课题之际，我们发现它的领军人物却陷入了最怀旧的天真，宣称“人民”是高贵的野蛮人，是极其无知的，并接受了一份虚假的文本作为其运动的象征。

There’s a lot to unpack in these words, almost all of it unpleasant. Here at the very moment when folk music was emerging as a serious subject of scholarly study, we find its leading champion caught up in the most nostalgic naïveté, asserting the sublime ignorance of the Volk as noble savages, and embracing a fraudulent text as emblem of his movement.

然而，奥西安丑闻并非孤例。即使真实的手稿成为学术研究的基础，它们也被滥用，其对真相的蔑视令人难以置信。爱尔兰主教托马斯·珀西于1765年出版的《古英语诗歌遗迹》通常被认为是英国民间音乐的奠基之作。此前，传统歌曲集也曾出现过，但没有一部作品能像这本三卷本 180 首民谣合集一样，如此激发公众的想象力。与麦克弗森不同，珀西拥有一份可靠的原始文献，这是一本古老的诗歌和歌曲集，他发现它“躺在客厅书桌下的地板上，很脏”，主人是什罗普郡希夫纳尔的居民汉弗莱·皮特爵士。皮特的女仆用这张废纸生火，但精明的主教将手稿从熊熊烈火中拯救出来，并最终意识到其内容的价值——这是一本可能在一个世纪前由无名氏编纂的歌曲集。然而，珀西等了十多年才分享他的发现，直到麦克弗森的奥西安“译本”证明了出版古老民间材料的巨大利润后，他才受到启发，将其变成文学作品。珀西巧妙地评估了眼前的机会，打算在将民谣推向市场之前对其进行改进。珀西的《遗物》受到热烈欢迎，这无疑证实了这一决定的商业价值，但也再次以牺牲诚实和准确性为代价。民歌专家史蒂夫·鲁德（Steve Roud）的严厉评价是：“可以公正地说，出版的《遗物》对于我们理解[珀西]时代或之前的民谣或民歌毫无用处。他没有留下任何遗迹，他的作品中也没有任何内容可以作为可信的证据。” ⁷

Yet the Ossian scandal was no isolated case. Even when actual manuscripts served as the basis for scholarship, they were misused with such disdain for the truth as to boggle the mind. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published by Irish bishop Thomas Percy in 1765, is often considered the foundational work in British folk music. Collections of traditional songs had appeared before, but none of them captivated the public’s imagination as much as this compilation of 180 ballads in three volumes. And unlike Macpherson, Percy had an authentic source document, a collection of old poems and songs that he found “lying dirty on the floor, under a bureau in the parlour” of Sir Humphrey Pitt, a resident of Shifnal in Shropshire. Pitt’s chambermaid used this scrap paper to light fires, but the astute bishop rescued the manuscript from blazing oblivion and eventually recognized the value of its contents—a collection of songs compiled by an unknown hand, probably a century earlier. Yet Percy waited more than a decade before sharing his discovery, and was only inspired to turn it into a literary work after Macpherson’s Ossian ‘translations’ proved how lucrative the publication of old folk material could be. Cunningly assessing the opportunity before him, Percy aimed to improve his ballads before bringing them to the marketplace. The enthusiastic reception to his Reliques no doubt confirmed the commercial value of this decision, but once again at the price of honesty and accuracy. In the harsh verdict of folk song expert Steve Roud: “It can be justly claimed that the Reliques, as published, is completely useless in our attempts to understand ballads or folk songs in [Percy’s] time or before it. He left nothing alone, and nothing in his writing can be trusted as evidence.”⁷

这既是悲剧，也是宝贵的教训。珀西显然相信自己受到最高理想的激励——毫无疑问，赫尔德、劳埃德以及民歌运动中的无数其他人也都如此。当珀西最终被迫分享他的原始手稿以回应伪造指控时，他有一个现成的借口，并在他侄子编辑的后期版本中，在前言中新增了一个段落来解释。他声称，旧手稿如此腐烂和缺陷，“以至于一丝不苟地遵循其糟糕的读法，只会呈现出难以理解的胡言乱语。” 另一方面，“通过一些细微的修改或补充，一种极其美丽或有趣的意义便浮现出来，而这如此自然而轻松，以至于编辑很少能满足于虚荣心，正式声明改进之处。” 同样，在一开始民歌运动的创始人之一——而且还是位主教！——不仅为改写历史辩护，还解释说，这件事发生得如此“自然而然”，毫无办法^。8

There’s both tragedy here and an invaluable lesson. Percy clearly believed he was motivated by the highest ideals—as no doubt so did Herder and Lloyd and countless others in the folk song movement. When Percy was eventually forced to share his source manuscript, in response to accusations of forgery, he had a ready-made excuse, which he shared in a new paragraph added to the preface of his collection in a later version edited by his nephew. The old manuscripts were so corrupt and defective, he claimed, “that a scrupulous adherence to their wretched readings would only have exhibited unintelligible nonsense.” On the other hand, “by a few slight corrections or additions, a most beautiful or interesting sense hath started forth, and this so naturally and easily, that the editor could seldom prevail upon himself to indulge the vanity of making a formal claim to the improvement.” Here again, at the very beginning of the folk song movement, a founding member—and a bishop, no less!—not only defends rewriting history, but explains that it happened so “naturally and easily” that it couldn’t be helped.⁸

或许你会对此感到愤怒。但麦克弗森和珀西所做的，正是我们在这段颠覆性历史中屡屡目睹的。唯一的区别在于，他们身处的时代，其他学者可以揭露他们的两面派——尽管那些秉持透明和诚实的人通常会因其维护该领域的权威而受到攻击和嘲笑。当主流音乐吸收一种新的音乐类型时，它总是会重新构建其谱系和历史，以适应当下的需求，而那些试图对这一过程施加严格控制的人很少能取得多大成功。在某种程度上，我们应该感谢这些民歌骗子，他们最终将音乐史视野之外的幕后真相公之于众。通过探究这一时期吸收过程的内部运作，我们或许能够更好地理解其他时代发生的事情。例如，我们或许能够更深入地理解品达的抒情诗是如何流传后世，而萨福的抒情诗却大多以零散的片段形式存在于后世作家的作品中。我们或许能够重现浪漫爱情抒情诗在某个时代被禁，在下一个时代却成为贵族知识产权的过程。我们或许能够洞察像《武装的人》这样一首神秘的流行歌曲是如何进入天主教弥撒的，或者理解像《布兰诗歌》（相当于珀西民谣手稿的中世纪版本）这样的手抄本是如何被扭曲成民族主义意识形态的道具的。又或许（敬请期待下一章），我们或许能够理解W.C.汉迪是如何凭借他的《圣路易斯布鲁斯》赢得名利的，而那位在密西西比州塔特威勒火车站激发他灵感的音乐家却甚至没有在史册上留下自己的名字。这就是同化和传播的过程，它从来不需要作恶者和恶意（尽管它们在我们的历史上并非完全不存在）。一位杰出的主教，一位受人尊敬的哲学家，一位才华横溢的诗人，一位受人尊敬的基督教作曲家，甚至所谓的“蓝调之父”，都可以玩这个游戏，并且晚上还能睡个好觉。

Perhaps you feel outraged by this. But Macpherson and Percy were simply doing the same thing we have already witnessed repeatedly in the course of this subversive history. The only difference in this case is that they operated in an age when other scholars could expose their double-dealings—although the upholders of transparency and honesty were typically attacked and ridiculed for their efforts at policing the field. When the mainstream assimilates a new kind of music, it always reconfigures its lineage and history to meet the needs of the present moment, and those who try to impose strict controls on the process rarely have much success. In a way, we ought to feel gratitude for these folk song fraudsters, who finally revealed to the light of day what previously happened behind the scenes, outside the purview of music history. By peering into the inner workings of the assimilation process in this period, we may gain a better grasp of what has occurred in other ages. We might, for example, arrive at a deeper understanding of how Pindar’s lyrics were preserved for posterity, while Sappho’s survive mostly in isolated fragments embedded in the works of later authors. We might be able to reconstruct the steps by which romantic love lyrics, forbidden in one era, became the intellectual property of the nobility in the next. We may discern the path by which a mysterious popular refrain, such as “L’homme armé,” found its way into dozens of Catholic masses, or understand how a manuscript such as the Carmina Burana, a medieval equivalent to Percy’s folk ballad manuscript, got distorted into a prop for nationalist ideology. Or (looking forward to our next chapter) we might grasp how W. C. Handy earned fame and wealth for his “St. Louis Blues,” while the musician who inspired him at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, didn’t even leave his name behind for the history books. This is how the process of assimilation and dissemination works, and at no point does it require evildoers and malicious intent (although they aren’t completely absent from our history). An eminent bishop, an esteemed philosopher, a brilliant poet, a revered Christian composer, even the so-called “Father of the Blues,” can all play the game, and still sleep well at night.

因此，我们需要警惕任何将旧音乐重新利用的尝试视为体制崩溃的想法。他们本身就是体制。当代人总是毫不留情地重新利用从过去传承下来的歌曲，而且永远都会如此。我们可以努力提高透明度和诚实度——这正是本书的主题——并在出现荒谬论断时鼓励旁观者保持适度的怀疑态度，但即使面临所有改革的劝告，这种重新利用仍将继续。当然，这种做法会随着时间的流逝而改变：20世纪40年代，比波普音乐人为老歌添加新的旋律（称为“contrafacts”）；20世纪50年代，熟悉歌曲的轻音乐版本；20世纪60年代，摇滚翻唱乐队；20世纪70年代，磁带混音带；20世纪80年代，嘻哈采样……一直到如今的混音和流行歌星全息图。在过去，这个过程可能需要在遥远的地球某个角落进行精心策划的歌曲收集工作，但在数字时代，只需在手持设备上进行简单的复制粘贴即可。然而，无论你如何称呼它，这种重新利用对于音乐生态系统来说，就像食物链或水循环对于自然生态系统一样，都是不可或缺的一部分。

So we need to guard against any notion that these attempts to repurpose the music of the past represent a breakdown in the system. They are the system. The current generation is always ruthless in repurposing songs inherited from the past, and always will be. We can strive for more transparency and honesty—that’s what this book is about—and encourage a healthy dose of skepticism among onlookers when outrageous claims are made, but the repurposing will continue in the face of all exhortations to reform. Of course, the way it happens will change with the passing decades: beboppers adding new melodies (known as contrafacts) to old songs in the 1940s; easy listening versions of familiar tunes in the 1950s; rock cover bands in the 1960s; cassette mixtapes in the 1970s; hip-hop sampling in the 1980s… all the way to the remixes and pop star holograms of the current day. Back in the past, this process might have required an elaborate song-collecting mission in a distant part of the world, but in the digital age it can happen with a simple copy-and-paste on a handheld device. Yet whatever you call it, this repurposing is as much a part of the musical ecosystem as the food chain or the water cycle is to the natural ecosystem.

同样，我们必须驳斥那些认为民谣音乐根本不存在、只是奸商和操纵者虚构的荒唐说法。例如，戴夫·哈克就秉持着这种观点，他声称民谣只是伪歌。这种观点在许多其他针对音乐真实性概念的攻击中也得到了呼应。对艺术真实性概念的深入剖析超出了本书的范畴，我希望在另一个能够给予其应有关注的场合进行探讨。真实性或许是目前所有音乐中最容易被误解的概念。但即使我们只关注已有的例子，我们也能发现，在奸商和净化者出现之前，每一个例子中都存在着一批作品，而且往往甚至蓬勃发展。我们见过尊贵的比德，他对牧羊人卡德蒙的即兴歌唱印象深刻，于是他记录了这首抒情诗——这是已知来源中现存最古老的古英语抒情诗——他的教会史。我们在艺术评论家约翰·拉斯金身上也遇到了同样的情况，他也对牧民贝阿特丽斯·贝尔纳迪非凡的音乐记忆力感到震惊。我们研究了哈佛大学学者米尔曼·帕里和阿尔伯特·洛德如何努力保存土耳其农民阿夫多·梅杰多维奇的非凡史诗歌唱，以及约翰·洛马克斯如何为德克萨斯州亨茨维尔监狱的非裔美国囚犯詹姆斯“铁头”贝克做同样的事情。根据情况和议程的不同，这些资料的保存和记录可能细致入微，也可能不充分。但在每一次干预中——以及几十年来学者和民族音乐学家进行的许多类似干预中——一种根植于现实世界的民间实践早在“专家”带着他们的方案和录音技术出现之前就已存在。

By the same token, we must reject the bizarre allegation that folk music doesn’t really exist, that it’s all just a construct of profiteers and manipulators. This is the party line, for example, of Dave Harker, with his claim that folk song is just fake song, and it is echoed in many other attacks on the concept of authenticity in music. A deep dissection of the notion of artistic authenticity is beyond the scope of this book, and I hope to write about it in another setting where I can give it the attention it deserves. Authenticity may be the most misunderstood concept in all of music at the current moment. But even if we just focus on examples already given, we can see that in every instance, a body of work exists, and often even flourishes, before the profiteers and purifiers arrive on the scene. We have seen the Venerable Bede, so struck by the impromptu singing of the herder Caedmon that he documented the lyrics—the oldest surviving lyric in Old English from a known source—in his ecclesiastical history. We encountered the same with art critic John Ruskin, who was similarly struck by the extraordinary musical memory of Beatrice Bernardi, also a herder. We have studied how Harvard scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord worked to preserve the remarkable epic singing of a Turkish peasant, Avdo Međedović, and John Lomax doing the same with James “Iron Head” Baker, an African American inmate at Huntsville Penitentiary in Texas. The preservation and documentation of these sources might be scrupulous or inadequate, depending on circumstances and agendas. But in each of these interventions—and many others like them by scholars and ethnomusicologists over the decades—a folk practice embedded in the real world exists long before the ‘experts’ show up with their schemes and recording technologies.

如果我们想要理解音乐在人类生活中的角色，就必须认真对待这些来自过去的文献，即使它们经过了一位有志收藏家的筛选。坦白说，看到这些音乐即使在被净化以供大众消费之后，仍然如此令人不安和越轨，令人欣慰。即使是珀西也无法完全掩盖他的痕迹，尤其是当我们不仅考虑到他出版的民谣版本，还考虑到他的原始文献和信件（其中包括许多读者寄给他的歌曲）。残存的淫秽和暴力几乎可以证明，主流化和净化过程是有限度的。珀西主教的民谣充斥着谋杀、强奸、袭击、通奸、肢解、抢劫以及其他淫秽和暴力的记录。珀西对这些材料的尴尬或许是他不愿分享手稿的原因之一，他毫不犹豫地承认其中很多内容都是垃圾或胡言乱语。他甚至请求读者原谅他出版作品的粗鲁。珀西深深的羞愧和尴尬或许是我们最可靠的证据，证明歌词中一些原本充满活力的精神在这位严厉编辑的干预下得以保留。

If we want to understand the role of music in human life, we must take these documents from the past seriously, even if they come through the filter of a collector with a cause. And, frankly, it’s reassuring to witness how disturbing and transgressive much of this music remains even after it is cleaned up for mass consumption. Even Percy couldn’t cover his tracks completely, especially when we take into account not only his published versions of ballads, but also his source documents and correspondence (which includes many songs sent to him by readers). The obscenity and violence that survive can almost serve as guarantees that the mainstreaming and purifying process had limits. Bishop Percy’s ballads are marked by accounts of murder, rape, assault, adultery, dismemberment, pillage, and other instances of lewdness and violence. Percy’s embarrassment at this material may have contributed to his reluctance to share the manuscript, and he didn’t hesitate to admit that much of it was trash or nonsense. He even asked readers to forgive him for the rudeness of his published work. Percy’s deep sense of shame and awkwardness is perhaps our most reliable sign that some of the original animating spirit of the lyrics managed to survive the interventions of this heavy-handed editor.

这种对性和暴力的痴迷在哈佛大学教授弗朗西斯·詹姆斯·查尔德（Francis James Child）于十九世纪末收集的著名民谣中更加明显。这本苏格兰和英格兰传统民谣及其变体，最终约有2500页，早已成为民歌运动史上最具影响力的作品。这本合集收录了305首民谣，现被称为《儿童民谣集》，是目前最接近英语传统歌曲典范的作品——其中许多作品在欧洲大陆，尤其是在北欧，都有类似的版本，这证明了这门音乐的跨国界影响力。对于民谣歌手来说，这些歌曲几乎是神圣的文本。

This obsession with sex and violence is even more noticeable in the famous ballads that a Harvard professor, Francis James Child, collected in the late nineteenth century. This compilation of Scottish and English traditional ballads and their variants, eventually comprising some 2,500 pages, long ago established itself as the most influential work in the history of the folk song movement. The 305 ballads included in this collection, known now as the Child Ballads, is the nearest thing we have to a canon of traditional songs in the English language—and many of the works have close counterparts on the continent, especially in northern Europe, testifying to the cross-border reach of this body of music. These are almost sacred texts to a folk singer.

然而，这些作品被奉为圭臬，并拥有哈佛大学认可的高雅血统，不应让我们忽视其颠覆性的内容。这些故事歌曲几乎涵盖了所有类型的越轨行为。强奸是这些民谣中常见的情节，有时还会融入浪漫情节，强奸犯和受害者最终结婚，似乎从此过上了幸福的生活。许多民谣都涉及乱伦，通常是事后才发现，然后通过谋杀或自杀来补救。歌曲中展现了一系列酷刑技巧和残酷的报复方式，但它们既可能被用来对付有德之人，也可能被用来挫败作恶者。事实上，任何试图根据这些民谣构建一套连贯的道德准则的人，最终只会得到一堆令人毛骨悚然的格言。在《乌鸦和馅饼》（儿童歌谣 111）中，女性被告知要避免被强奸，但如果真的被强奸，她们应该从强奸犯那里得到一些钱，或者至少知道他的姓名和地址。其他一些关于袭击和暴力的故事都建议人们选择来自苏格兰高地而不是低地，或者来自英格兰而不是苏格兰的配偶。但这些教训不过是表面功夫，让人想起 20 世纪 70 年代色情制品制作者为了避免淫秽指控，曾试图强调其淫秽作品的“救赎社会价值”（最高法院在米勒诉加利福尼亚州案中的著名判决）。在《儿童歌谣》中，道德说教是公式化的，但这些低俗的细节却让歌曲得以流传。

Yet the reverence with which these works are treated and the highbrow pedigree of their Harvard imprimatur should not blind us to their subversive content. These story songs feature virtually every kind of transgressive behavior. Rape is a frequent event in these ballads, and is sometimes integrated into a romance plot, with rapist and victim eventually marrying and apparently living happily ever after. Numerous ballads deal with incest, often only discovered after the fact, and then remedied through murder or suicide. A whole litany of torture techniques and modes of brutal revenge are presented, but they are just as likely to be used against the virtuous as to thwart evildoers. In fact, anyone attempting to construct a coherent moral code on the basis of these ballads would be left with a mishmash of horrid maxims. In “Crow and Pie” (Child Ballad 111), women are advised to avoid getting raped, but if it does happen, they should get some money from the man, or at least learn his name and address. Other stories of assault and violence are capped with advice to pick a spouse from the Highlands rather than the Lowlands, or from England, not Scotland. But the lessons are little more than window-dressing, reminiscent of the token attempts of pornographers in the 1970s to avoid obscenity charges by highlighting the “redeeming social values” (in the famous words of the Supreme Court decision Miller v. California) of their smut. In the Child Ballads, the moralizing is formulaic, but the tawdry details kept the songs in circulation.

我统计了《童谣》的情节成分，发现超过三分之二的童谣涉及暴力。大约三分之一的童谣涉及性，而且性常常与性行为搭配在一起。充满暴力。然而，任何统计数据都无法概括各种情节细节的粗俗。以《小猫头鹰》（童谣291）为例，主人公反抗姑妈的乱伦，姑妈为了报复，告诉丈夫是这个年轻人引诱了她——小猫头鹰的叔叔为了解决这个问题，派一群野马把他的侄子撕成碎片。在民谣的尾声，歌手提到，受害者的邻居无论走到哪里，都会发现小猫头鹰被肢解的肉和滴滴鲜血。

I tabulated the plot ingredients in the Child Ballads and found that more than two-thirds of them involve violence. Around one-third of the ballads deal with sex, and the sex is frequently paired with violence. Yet no statistical summary can convey the coarseness of the various plot details. Take, for example, “Child Owlet” (Child Ballad 291), where the protagonist resists the incestuous advances of his aunt, who exacts murderous revenge by telling her husband the young man seduced her—Child Owlet’s uncle solves the problem by having his nephew torn limb from limb by a team of wild horses. In the ballad’s coda, the singer notes that neighbors of the victim will find bits of Child Owlet’s dismembered flesh and drops of his blood wherever they go.

这类歌曲或许会赢得传统音乐的尊重，但它们却很难弘扬所谓的传统价值观。因此，即使是一首备受推崇的民谣，在现代社会也可能引发愤怒，甚至引发审查要求。历史的奇妙转折是，一首儿童民谣启发了1967年最具争议的热门单曲。当时的报纸充斥着关于迷幻药成瘾、市中心骚乱和对外战争的报道，但BBC却将怒火直指都柏林人乐队于3月底发行的《七个醉酒之夜》。这首歌改编自《我们的好人》（儿童民谣274），讲述了一位妻子对她醉酒丈夫编造的匪夷所思的借口，而丈夫每晚酗酒归来，都会发现妻子有了情人的证据。在那个时候，米克·贾格尔可以毫无顾忌地在 BBC 电台演唱《让我们共度良宵》，但这首可追溯至 18 世纪 60 年代的民歌却被视为禁忌。

Such songs may gain respect as traditional music, but they hardly advance so-called traditional values. As a result, even a revered folk ballad can still stir up outrage or demands for censorship in modern times. In a strange twist of history, a Child Ballad inspired the most controversial hit single of 1967. Newspapers at the time were filled with accounts of bad LSD trips, inner-city riots, and foreign wars, but the BBC directed its ire at “Seven Drunken Nights,” released at the end of March by The Dubliners. This song, based on “Our Goodman” (Child Ballad 274), recounts a wife’s implausible excuses to her intoxicated husband, who returns from his drinking binges each night to find evidence that she’s taken on a lover. At that juncture, Mick Jagger could sing “Let’s Spend the Night Together” on BBC radio with impunity, but a folk song dating back to the 1760s was considered taboo.

即便如此，政府的禁令也难以遏制这首歌的成功，尤其是在那个年代，在海上真实船只上运营的海盗电台兴起的情况下。卡罗琳电台（Radio Caroline）为了避开英国的监管，在国际水域一艘188英尺长的渡轮上进行广播，帮助《七个醉酒的夜晚》成为了一首流行金曲。这首歌甚至在爱尔兰的排行榜上名列前茅。当电视节目《流行音乐排行榜》（Top of the Pops）勉强同意让都柏林人乐队（The Dubliners）在其节目中演唱《七个醉酒的夜晚》时，敏锐的听众注意到，这首歌只收录了七个夜晚中的五个——另外两个被认为过于煽动性，不宜播出。

Even so, a government ban could hardly stifle the song’s success, especially with the rise of pirate radio stations operating on actual ships offshore during that era. Radio Caroline, broadcasting from a 188-foot ferry ship in international waters in order to avoid British regulations, helped turn “Seven Drunken Nights” into a pop hit. The song even reached the top place on the chart in Ireland. When the TV program Top of the Pops begrudgingly agreed to let The Dubliners perform “Seven Drunken Nights” on its show, astute listeners noticed that only five of the seven nights were featured in the song—the other two were considered too scandalous to broadcast.

没有证据表明查尔德教授故意挑选最耸人听闻的材料作为他的收藏，而且同样令人不安的素材从未被收录到他的经典作品中。英国广播歌谣档案馆馆长帕特里夏·富默顿让我关注大约1630年的《地主的兰索恩》，这首歌讲述了上帝对一位地主的惩罚，这位地主在一位妇女的丈夫战死沙场后，将她和她的孩子们赶出了家。在这首只有四十八行的歌中，我们可以看到情节的曲折，包括肢解、兽交、巫术、卖淫、叛国、绞刑、火刑和自杀。即使在我们这个宽容的时代，这类故事也跨越了定义可接受叙事的界限。然而，作为民间音乐，这些相同的主题不仅获得了合法性，甚至还获得了一种作为真实性护身符的崇敬。

There’s no evidence that Professor Child deliberately selected the most sensationalistic material for his collection, and there are examples of equally disturbing material that never made its way into his canon. The director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive, Patricia Fumerton, has called my attention to “A Lanthorne for Landlords,” circa 1630, which deals with God’s punishment of a landlord who evicts a woman and her children from their home after her husband dies in battle. In the course of a song of just forty-eight lines, we encounter plot twists involving dismemberment, bestiality, witchcraft, prostitution, treason, execution by hanging, burning at the stake, and suicide. Even in our tolerant age, such stories cross the boundaries that define acceptable narratives. Yet as folk music, these same themes gained not only legitimacy but even a kind of reverence as talismans of authenticity.

我们不禁要问，有多少歌曲因为被认为淫秽而被审查或从早期的歌集中完全删除。塞西尔·夏普和莫德·卡佩莱斯在编纂他们开创性的作品《南阿巴拉契亚山脉的英国民歌》（1932年）时，巧妙地运用团队合作来应对这类作品：夏普一丝不苟地抄录音乐，而卡佩莱斯则选择性地写下歌词，删除任何过于淫秽或露骨的内容。这种方法为二人组创作出了一首适合出版的、但又不至于过于真实以至于冒犯读者纯洁情感的歌曲。然而，即使思想更为开明的收藏家愿意保留较为粗俗的歌词，那些向他们提供歌曲的乡下人和普通民众也必然会经常保持克制。如果一位哈佛毕业的国会图书馆学者带着昂贵的录音设备出现在你家门口，你会不会忍不住哼唱《我怎能保住我的处女之身》或《九英寸能取悦一位女士》？这些离奇的歌曲竟然能被记录下来，真是令人匪夷所思，我们可以肯定地说，每有一首流传下来的歌词，就有数百首淫秽的歌词失传。

And we are left to wonder how many songs were censored or omitted entirely from the early song collections because of their perceived obscenity. When Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles were compiling their seminal work English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1932), they responded to such works with a clever team effort: Sharp would transcribe the music with scrupulous fidelity, while Karpeles would selectively write down the words, leaving out anything too lewd or explicit. This method provided the duo with an authentic song, suitable for publication, but not so authentic as to offend the chaste sensibilities of their readers. But even when more open-minded collectors were willing to preserve coarser lyrics, the rustics and common folk who provided them with songs must have frequently exercised restraint. If a Harvard-educated scholar from the Library of Congress shows up at your doorstep with an expensive recording device, are you inclined to belt out a rendition of “How Can I Keep My Maidenhead,” or “Nine Inch Will Please a Lady”? It’s remarkable that any of these outré songs were documented at all, and we can safely assume that hundreds of obscene lyrics were lost to posterity for every one that survived.

我们对淫秽音乐的了解，很大程度上并非来自学者，而是来自刑事司法系统的记录。一项关于19世纪伦敦反腐行动的调查显示，“（床单上的）淫秽歌曲”实际上比……更常见。“不纯洁的书籍”或“淫秽出版物”。英国警方没收了数以万计的此类非法歌曲，但肯定还有无数其他歌曲无需印刷机就能传播开来，通过言传身教和耳濡目染。坚持不懈的研究者可以找到在妓院和其他声名狼藉的场所进行的合唱记录，在那里，乐手们显然熟悉曲调，而顾客们可以提供歌词。许多耳熟能详的歌曲都有故意粗俗无礼的替代歌词，即使是最警惕的司法当局也难以阻止它们的传播。但他们肯定尝试过。任何公正准确的歌曲收集者名单都必须包括扫黄组和刑事法庭——我们唯一的遗憾是，他们收集了但没有保存其管辖范围内的德国人民丰富的民间材料^。9

Much of our knowledge of obscene music comes not via scholars, but from the records of the criminal justice system. A nineteenth-century survey of vice suppression efforts in London reveals that “obscene songs (on sheets)” were actually more common than “impure books” or “obscene publications.” British police confiscated tens of thousands of these illegal songs, yet countless others must have spread without the need for a printing press, taught by example and learned by ear. The persistent researcher can find accounts of sing-alongs at brothels and other disreputable settings, where musicians clearly knew the tunes and the patrons could supply the words. Many familiar songs had alternative lyrics that were deliberately crude and offensive, and the most vigilant legal authorities could hardly prevent their dissemination. But they certainly tried. Any fair and accurate list of song collectors must include the vice squad and criminal courts—our only regret is that they collected but did not preserve the rich folk material of the Volk under their jurisdiction.⁹

巧合的是，高雅音乐也同样痴迷于性和暴力主题。事实上，歌剧和民谣之间的融合相当惊人。在约翰·盖伊凭借《乞丐歌剧》（1728年）取得商业成功后，通俗民谣歌剧蓬勃发展，其中融入了真实的民间旋律和下流人物。但即使是最精英的歌剧，也一次又一次地被超越常规的情节所吸引。从1600年的《切法洛的强暴》开始，强奸就在歌剧中占据重要地位。尽管歌剧受到严格的审查，但在随后的几个世纪里，强奸仍然在歌剧舞台上反复出现。以莫扎特为例，他很难说是黑暗面的代表——但如果我们只能从他的歌剧故事中得出什么结论呢？在《唐璜》 （1787）的开场，一位蒙面男主角半夜闯入一位年轻女子的房间，他显然是个强奸犯，意图满足自己的性欲。女子尖叫求救，她的父亲赶来营救，但却被入侵者杀害，入侵者随后逃走——或许已经计划对另一名女子施暴。强奸的威胁也推动了《费加罗的婚礼》（1786）的情节发展，其中阿尔玛维瓦伯爵不愿放弃他的“领主权”（droit du seigneur），这项所谓的传统允许封建领主在新婚之夜剥夺处女的贞操。甚至更早，在莫扎特的《后宫诱逃》（1782）中，女性被绑架并被奴役于后宫。这些情节中的暴力和性与我们在同一时期的民谣中发现的惊人地相似。

In an odd coincidence, highbrow music showed the same obsession with themes of sex and violence. In fact, the convergence between opera and folk ballad is rather striking. In the case of the popular ballad operas that flourished in the wake of John Gay’s commercial success with The Beggar’s Opera (1728), actual folk melodies and lowlife characters were incorporated into the proceedings. But even the most elitist operas gravitated again and again to transgressive plots. Rape figured prominently in opera from its very beginnings, with Il Rapimento di Cefalo in 1600, and despite intense censorship imposed on the genre, it kept recurring on the opera stage over the ensuing centuries. Take the case of Mozart, hardly a representative of the dark side—but what might we conclude if all we had to go on were the stories of his operas? At the opening of Don Giovanni (1787), a masked protagonist breaks into a young woman’s room in the middle of the night, an apparent rapist intent on gratifying his lust. The woman screams for help and her father comes to her rescue, but is murdered by the intruder, who then escapes—perhaps already hatching plans to attempt the same with another woman. The threat of rape also drives the plot in The Marriage of Figaro (1786), where Count Almaviva is reluctant to give up his droit du seigneur, the alleged tradition allowing a feudal lord the right to deflower virgins on their wedding nights. Even earlier, in Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), women are kidnapped and enslaved in a harem. The violence and sex in these plots are strikingly similar to what we find in the folk ballads of the same period.

而且它们仍然具有震撼力。2004 年柏林上演的《后宫诱逃》被贴上了警告标签，但这并没有阻止评论家们谴责它是一种变态行为。围绕歌剧剧目中的经典作品的争议仍在继续。2015 年，伦敦皇家歌剧院上演的罗西尼歌剧《威廉·退尔》中一段特别露骨的性暴力场面引发了观众的嘘声，记者们在评论中纷纷谴责其残忍和肮脏。2018 年意大利上演的《卡门》甚至与乔治·比才的著名歌剧采用了不同的结局。在经历了几十年的朋克摇滚和黑帮说唱之后，你也许认为我们已经习惯了这种情况，或者至少已经麻木而默许。但音乐似乎总能触及我们心灵最原始的部分和社会生活中最不正常的角落。自从歌剧诞生以来，歌剧的管理机构就不得不处理这种紧张局势，但尽管他们进行了所有的清洗和审查，紧张局势仍然没有得到解决。

And they have not lost their shock value. A 2004 production of The Abduction from the Seraglio in Berlin came with a warning label, although that did not deter critics from denouncing it as an exercise in perversion. And controversies continue to erupt over the canonic works in the opera repertoire. In 2015, audiences at the Royal Opera House in London booed an especially graphic enactment of sexual violence in a production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, and journalists peppered their reviews with denunciations of its brutality and nastiness. A 2018 production of Carmen in Italy went so far as to construct a different ending to Georges Bizet’s famous opera. After decades of punk rock and gangsta rap, you might think we would be inured to such situations, or at least benumbed into acquiescence. But there is something about music that seems to seek out the rawest parts of our psyche and the most dysfunctional corners of our social life. The ruling institutions of opera have had to deal with that edginess since the origins of the genre, but for all their cleansing and censoring, the tension remains unresolved.

在当时，民间音乐在很多情况下充当着新闻的病毒式传播媒介。但并非任何新闻都能传播。故事越令人不安，就越有可能与旋律联系在一起。如今，我们很少用歌声来歌颂暴力犯罪、战场屠杀、自然灾害以及其他类似的悲剧，这仅仅是因为我们有其他方式来传递坏消息。早期的情况截然不同。如果我们从结婚证上的签名来判断，那么直到十八世纪，英国仍有超过一半的人口是文盲。因此，即使是报纸，也无法像一首好歌那样广为传播。

In many instances, folk music served as the viral medium for news in those days. But not just any kind of news. The more disturbing the story, the more likely it was to become attached to a melody. We don’t sing much nowadays about violent crimes, battlefield carnage, natural disasters, and other such tragedies, but merely because we have other ways of sharing bad tidings. Matters were far different in earlier eras. If we can judge by the signatures on marriage documents, more than half the population of England was still illiterate well into the eighteenth century. So even a newspaper lacked the reach of a good song.

所谓的“处决歌谣”和“谋杀歌谣”尤其受公众欢迎。我怀疑在我们当今的文化中，是否有任何东西能与这些歌曲所达到的恐怖与欢庆的结合相媲美。一首关于约翰·费尔顿被处决的歌谣的歌词——这个可怜的家伙把教皇对伊丽莎白一世女王的逐出教会的法令贴在了主教府的门上。1570年在伦敦居住期间，他被残忍地分尸和绞刑，但这首歌的配乐是一首至今仍用于排舞的乡村曲调，并鼓励人们跳“ do-si-do”和拍手。这难道真的是伊丽莎白时代的派对音乐吗？这些民谣一次又一次地将最残酷的细节搬上舞台，供公众欣赏。在一首纪念1638年爱德华·科尔曼被处决的歌曲中，这首歌的歌词丝毫没有留下任何想象空间。科尔曼被处决的依据是有人诬告他计划刺杀查理二世。

So-called execution ballads and murder ballads were especially popular with the public. I doubt if anything in our current culture can match the combination of the macabre and the celebratory achieved by these songs. The text of a ballad about the execution of John Felton—the poor fellow who posted the pope’s decree excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I on the door of the bishop’s residence in London in 1570—includes brutal descriptions of his quartering and hanging, but was set to a country tune that even today is used for line dancing—with exhortations to do-si-do and clap your hands. Could this really be Elizabethan party music? Again and again, the worst details were summoned up for the public’s delectation in these ballads. In the song commemorating the 1638 execution of Edward Coleman, based on bogus accusations that he planned to assassinate Charles II, the lyrics leave nothing to the imagination.

他的肠子被掏出，投入火中，

His Bowels ripd out, in the flames to be cast,

他的成员们对要安置的波兰人进行了辩论^。10

His Members disseverd on Poles to be placd.¹⁰

许多行刑歌谣都以莎士比亚时代最受欢迎的歌曲之一《命运我的敌人》为曲调，这首旋律被用来传达阴郁、毁灭性或仅仅是虐待狂性质的新闻。1635 年，一首讲述里夫兄弟被处决的单面民谣伴随着这首旋律演唱，不仅告诉听众凶手如何被吊在铁链上腐烂，还保证路人仍然可以看到正在腐烂的尸体——为了消除任何疑虑，单面民谣上还附上了一幅粗糙的插图。印刷商后来经常重复使用这些歌曲中的暴力图像来说明有新闻价值的事件，人们可以说，古老的英国民谣就是我们现在所说的视觉迷因的起源。但这些音乐也以奇怪而令人惊讶的方式传播开来。有时，旁观者会在行刑期间唱起《命运我的敌人》，为屠杀提供合适的背景音乐。然而，这首曲调却经常出现在舞台上，用于歌唱场景，甚至在喜剧中也是如此。这首小调歌曲或许被称为“悬念曲”，但这并没有阻止威廉·伯德为维金纳琴谱曲《命运我的敌人》，也没有阻止约翰·道兰从中汲取灵感，创作出他轻柔的鲁特琴音乐。如此出人意料地改编了伊丽莎白时代英国最黑暗的歌曲，几乎可以成为所谓“绞刑架幽默”的典型例子。

Many of these execution ballads were set to the tune of “Fortune My Foe,” one of the most popular songs of Shakespeare’s day, and a favorite melody for conveying news of a gloomy, destructive, or merely sadistic nature. In the 1635 broadside ballad recounting the execution of the Reeve brothers, sung to this melody, listeners were not only told how the killers were hung in chains and left to rot, but assured that the disintegrating corpses were still available for viewing by passersby—a crude illustration was included on the broadside to remove any doubt. Printers often later reused the violent images that accompanied these songs to illustrate newsworthy events, and one could make a case that the old British ballads originated what we now call a visual meme. But the music also went viral in strange and surprising ways. Sometimes onlookers sang “Fortune My Foe” during the execution to provide an appropriate soundtrack for the slaughter. Yet this same tune frequently found its way onto the stage for song scenes, even in comedies. This minor-key song may have gotten dubbed the “hanging tune,” but that didn’t stop William Byrd from setting “Fortune My Foe” for the virginal, or John Dowland drawing inspiration from it for his gentle lute music. Such an unlikely repurposing of the darkest song in Elizabethan England could almost serve as a defining example of what is called ‘gallows’ humor.

以免你以为我们已经超越了这些粗俗的歌曲，我要指出的是，行刑歌谣《汤姆·杜利》在1958年登上了《公告牌》排行榜的榜首，谋杀歌谣《弗兰基和约翰尼》为猫王埃尔维斯·普雷斯利赢得了金唱片。约翰尼·卡什凭借《长长的黑面纱》大获成功，这是一首现代商业歌曲，与行刑歌谣有很多相似之处——这首歌被许多音乐巨星翻唱，包括米克·贾格尔、布鲁斯·斯普林斯汀和戴夫·马修斯乐队。其他商业唱片，从《麦克刀》到《嘿，乔》，都以各种方式唤起了古老的谋杀歌谣传统。

And lest you think we have evolved beyond such crude songs, I’ll point out that the execution ballad “Tom Dooley” reached number one on the Billboard chart in 1958, and the murder ballad “Frankie and Johnny” earned a gold record for Elvis Presley. Johnny Cash enjoyed success with “Long Black Veil,” a modern commercial song with many similarities to execution ballads—and the song has been covered by a host of music megastars, including Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, and the Dave Matthews Band. Other commercial recordings, from “Mack the Knife” to “Hey Joe,” invoke in various ways the old murder ballad tradition.

这些歌曲的道德说教意在传达一个简单的信息：犯罪没有好处。然而，在很早的阶段，民间音乐史册中就出现了一个颠覆性的反主题，将这一警示完全颠倒过来。罪犯在许多歌曲中被塑造成英雄；听众为他们欢呼，有时他们还能活下来犯下更多罪行。罗宾汉，这位英雄罪犯的原型，是“儿童歌谣”中最受欢迎的人物，出现在近四十首此类歌曲中。许多其他传统歌谣也歌颂了形形色色的亡命之徒和反叛者，当权者的敌人成为了平民百姓的宠儿。但同样的逆转在歌剧中也占据着显著的位置，再次证明了高雅音乐风格与低俗音乐风格的融合。《唐璜》经久不衰的流行，展现了杀人犯和诱惑者是多么的迷人，即使是片尾将主人公送入地狱之火的场景，也丝毫没有削弱他的英雄气概。最受欢迎的歌剧中充满了这样的反转，从贝多芬《费德里奥》中囚犯的获释，到众多如今已成为经典的作品中对罪犯和妓女的理想化刻画。这一主题如此突出，跨越了流派和国界，以至于我们忍不住声称，反英雄的概念是音乐家们发明的。

The moralizing tone in these songs aims at conveying a simple message: crime doesn’t pay. Yet at a very early stage, a subversive counter-theme emerges in the folk music annals, turning this admonition on its head. Criminals are turned into the heroes of many songs; listeners cheer them on, and sometimes they survive to commit more offenses. Robin Hood, the archetype of the heroic criminal, is the most popular figure in the Child Ballads, appearing in almost forty of these songs. Many other traditional ballads celebrate outlaws and rebels of all stripes, the enemy of the establishment becoming the darling of the common folk. But the same type of reversal figures prominently in opera as well, proving again the convergence of high and low music styles. The enduring popularity of Don Giovanni shows just how alluring a murderer and seducer can be, and even a final scene consigning the protagonist to the flames of Hell fails to undercut his heroic stature. The most popular operas are filled with such reversals, from the freeing of the prisoners in Beethoven’s Fidelio to the idealized presentation of criminals and prostitutes in a host of now canonic works. The prominence of this theme across genres and national boundaries is so great that we are tempted to claim that musicians invented the concept of the antihero.

我（带着不情愿和沮丧）查看了维基百科上关于“反英雄”的条目，发现完全没有提到音乐。数字时代其他一些半可靠的信息来源也是如此。在这些“官方”报道中，好莱坞获得了大部分反英雄的普及功不可没，这得益于包括达希尔·哈米特、雷蒙德·钱德勒、欧内斯特·海明威和杰克·凯鲁亚克在内的多位作家的努力。但电影明星占据了最重要的位置（一如既往），我们只知道反英雄的黄金时代始于亨弗莱·鲍嘉，终于杰克·尼科尔森。在此过程中，我们还看到了詹姆斯·迪恩、史蒂夫·麦奎因、克林特·伊斯特伍德和其他演员，他们设法将粗暴的打破规则和高尚的情境伦理融入一个或多或少完整的心灵中。然而，民谣和史诗歌唱的出现早于所有这些趾高气扬的名人，在好莱坞偶然发现这一模式的几个世纪前就抓住了反英雄的精髓。

I’ve looked (with reluctance and dismay) at the Wikipedia entry for “Antihero” and found absolutely no mention of music. The same is true of other semi-reliable sources of information in the digital age. In these ‘official’ accounts, Hollywood gets most of the credit for popularizing the antihero, with some help from a diverse group of writers, including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac. But movie stars receive top billing (as always), and we are left with the notion that the golden age of the antihero started with Humphrey Bogart and ended with Jack Nicholson. Along the way, we got a dose of James Dean, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and other actors who somehow managed to embody gnarly rule-breaking and virtuous situational ethics in one more or less integrated psyche. Yet folk ballads and sung epics predate all of these swaggering celebrities, capturing the essence of the antihero many centuries before Hollywood stumbled onto the formula.

民间反英雄的形象远不止西方歌曲和民间传说。非洲骗子也融合了这种人格类型的主要特质。骗子与反英雄非常相似，自信地颠覆等级制度、规范和权力结构——不仅仅是像暴徒一样推翻它们，而是将其颠覆，并在旧秩序之上建立新秩序。许多其他传统中的神话和歌唱故事也同样如此，包括美洲原住民社区中关于郊狼的故事、阿拉伯民间传说中的辛巴达和精灵，以及澳大利亚原住民文化中的乌鸦。在许多情况下，歌唱者及其传统本身也被边缘化，这反而增加了他们对狡猾的局外人战胜局内人的叙事的兴趣。

And the folk antihero was hardly restricted to Western songs and folklore. The African trickster also incorporates the main ingredients of this personality type. The trickster, much like the antihero, confidently upsets hierarchies, norms, and power structures—not just toppling them, like a thug, but reversing them and imposing a new order on the old. The same is true of myths and sung stories in many other traditions, including tales about the coyote in Native American communities, Sinbad and the genies in Arabian folklore, and the crow in Australian Aboriginal culture. In many instances, the singers and their heritages have been marginalized themselves, and that merely increases their appetite for narratives about the sly outsider who triumphs over the insiders.

一旦你对流行歌曲 DNA 中蕴含的这一由来已久的主题产生了敏感，你就会开始在任何地方都能辨认出它。匪帮说唱只不过是商业音乐中歌唱的局外人叙事的最新化身。“亡命之徒”乡村音乐捕捉到了同样的精神，但针对的是截然不同的人口群体。是的，民主党和共和党都珍视他们的反英雄播放列表。这种对局外人的接纳经常引发争议、审查和各种限制。墨西哥立法者试图禁止“narcocorridos”，这种关于毒枭和贩毒集团暴徒的现代民谣与现在备受推崇的英国文化中的“儿童民谣”惊人地相似。同样，雷贝蒂卡音乐在 20 世纪 30 年代也因其美化而被希腊当局禁止犯罪行为。探戈的起源也与黑社会有关，长期以来面临着来自政界和宗教界的阻力。“探戈一直与打斗、与roña（污秽）以及违法者联系在一起，”阿根廷作曲家巴勃罗·齐格勒解释道，他将探戈的两个基本要素定义为“ mugre（污秽）和roña（打斗）”。在美国，经典布鲁斯音乐的吸引力也源于类似的秘诀，它以关于坏人的歌曲取悦观众，这些坏人往好了说是流浪的伤心人，往坏了说是暴力违法者，他们的价值观扰乱了他们所到访的社区——但很少能持续很长时间，因为他们的性格难以融入被制裁的日常生活。与这些音乐风格相比，海明威和鲍嘉在反英雄游戏中算是后来者^。11

Once you are sensitized to this time-honored theme embedded in the DNA of the popular song, you start recognizing it everywhere. Gangsta rap is merely the latest incarnation of the sung narrative of the outsider in commercial music. ‘Outlaw’ country music captures the same ethos but for a very different demographic group. Yes, both Democrats and Republicans cherish their antihero playlists. This embrace of the outsider frequently spurs controversy, censorship, and restrictions of various sorts. Mexican legislators have tried to prohibit narcocorridos, current-day ballads about drug lords and cartel thugs that are surprisingly similar to the now-revered Child Ballads of British culture. In the same way, rebetiko music was prohibited by Greek authorities in the 1930s for its glamorization of criminal behavior. Tango, in its origins, brandished the same underworld associations, and for a long time it faced pushback from authorities both political and religious. “Tango has always been related with fighting, with roña, with guys breaking the law,” explains Argentine composer Pablo Ziegler, who defines the two essential ingredients of this genre as “mugre [filth] and roña [fight].” In the United States, classic blues music built its appeal on a similar recipe, delighting audiences with songs about no-good men, at best wandering heartbreakers, at worst violent lawbreakers, whose values disrupted the communities they visited—but rarely for long, as their personalities resisted assimilation into the sanctioned and everyday. Compared with these music styles, Hemingway and Bogart were latecomers to the antihero game.¹¹

但我们如何理解这一过程的下一个阶段，即音乐家自身如何成为反英雄？这或许是现代音乐社会史上最重大的转变，却鲜少被人注意到，更遑论进行任何程度的严谨研究。在二十世纪中叶，反英雄精神超越了歌曲本身，开始塑造我们对歌手的印象。无论以何种定义，布鲁斯歌手罗伯特·约翰逊都是一位反英雄，而近年来所有试图淡化和主流化他人生故事的努力（或许是当代修正主义音乐史上最徒劳的尝试）从一开始就注定要失败。罗伯特·约翰逊永远是一位民间英雄，也是一位唱片艺术家，他的神话与他的音乐一样具有影响力。同样，鲍勃·迪伦是一位反英雄。图帕克·夏库尔是一位反英雄。威利·纳尔逊、迈尔斯·戴维斯和卢·里德也同样如此。歌曲增强了形象，但音乐家本人却比任何唱片都更加突出。他们是我们光荣的亡命之徒，是当代的罗宾汉，他们颠覆了权力结构，但他们用的是吉他或麦克风，而不是弓箭。无论他们唱什么，他们唱的永远都是自己。我们不会用其他方式。

But how do we come to grips with the next stage in the process, the path by which the musicians themselves became antiheroes? This may be the most significant shift in the social history of modern music, yet it is rarely noticed, let alone studied with any degree of rigor. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the antihero ethos moved outside the song and started shaping our images of the singer. By any definition, the blues singer Robert Johnson was an antihero, and all the efforts made in recent years to sterilize and mainstream his life story (perhaps the most futile project in contemporary revisionist music history) were doomed to failure from the outset. Robert Johnson will always be as much a folk hero as a recording artist, his mythos just as influential as his music. By the same token, Bob Dylan is an antihero. Tupac Shakur is an antihero. So are Willie Nelson, Miles Davis, and Lou Reed. The songs augment the image, but the musician looms larger than any recording. They are our glorious desperadoes, contemporary Robin Hoods who disrupt the power structure, but with guitars or microphones rather than bows and arrows, and whatever they sing about, they are always singing about themselves. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

所有这些强大的趋势和倾向，正是音乐产业的命脉，就像宝洁公司兜售牙膏和洗涤剂一样，兜售反叛，而这些趋势和倾向都建立在等级制度的逆转之上。这一切始于民歌运动。赫尔德和十八、十九世纪的歌曲收藏家们并非民歌的发明者——任何此类说法都经不起最基本的嗅觉检验。但他们仍然改变了一切。他们坚持认为文化的中心在低处，而非高处。他们基于那些被他人视为粗俗的歌曲，构建了一个框架和美学视野。事实证明，这种对卓越标准的转变比他们记录的实际歌曲更为重要。即使没有学者将其记录成书，民间音乐仍会继续蓬勃发展。然而，对高雅文化的攻击最终却是致命的。

All these powerful trends and tendencies, the very lifeblood of a music business that sells rebellion the way Procter & Gamble peddles toothpaste and detergent, are based on a reversal of hierarchies that started with the folk song movement. Herder and the song collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not invent the folk song—any claim of that sort fails to meet the most basic sniff test. But they still changed everything. They did this by insisting that the epicenter of culture was low, not high. They forged a framework and aesthetic vision built on songs others had dismissed as crude and vulgar. And this shift in standards of excellence proved more important than the actual songs they documented. Folk music would have continued to flourish even without scholars writing them down in books. The assault on highbrow culture, however, proved fatal.

到1896年弗朗西斯·詹姆斯·查尔德去世时，这一进程已近乎完成。拉格泰姆热潮才刚刚在美国兴起，并很快催生了斯科特·乔普林——他那个时代最具创新精神的美国作曲家——开创性的作品。新奥尔良的爵士乐起源于同一时期。在密西西比三角洲，那些足够精明、知道在哪里可以找到布鲁斯音乐的人可以听到它。探戈开始席卷阿根廷的夜生活。桑巴在巴西势头强劲。在早期，这些边缘和受压迫群体的音乐作品默默无闻，直到贵族和富有的赞助人使它们合法化。但规则已经改变。来自下层阶级的歌手不需要合法化——事实上，他们的魅力就在于他们没有被合法化这一简单事实。

By the time of Francis James Child’s death in 1896, the process was all but complete. The ragtime craze had just started in the United States, and soon would spawn the genre-defining works of Scott Joplin, the most innovative American composer of his day. The origins of jazz in New Orleans date back to this same time. In the Mississippi Delta, blues music could be heard by those savvy enough to know where to find it. Tango was starting to take over the nightlife of Argentina. Samba was gaining momentum in Brazil. In an earlier day, these musical offerings of the marginalized and oppressed would have existed in obscurity until nobles and wealthy patrons legitimized them. But the rules had changed. The singers from the underclass didn’t need legitimization—in fact, their allure drew on the simple fact that they were not legitimized.

巨大的转变已经发生；现在只需观察它在未来几十年将如何发展。从现在开始，交响曲和康塔塔仍将创作；君主和教皇仍可能对音乐发表意见，或聘请自己钟爱的表演者。歌剧院和音乐厅不会消失。它们仍将上演熟悉的曲目（尽管越来越需要补贴才能维持运营），有时甚至会给我们带来惊喜。但以金钱、名望或影响力来衡量，它们的辉煌时代已成过去。高雅文化如今已退居幕后，对更广泛的音乐生态系统的影响也越来越小。愿上帝保佑卡内基音乐厅——我们仍将以敬意对待您——但音乐界的脉搏如今将焕发新生。来自 Cotton Club、Birdland、Danceteria 或 CBGB。从这一刻起，大众听众将决定音乐行业的优先事项，它固执地将局外人和下层阶级的新审美视为自己的指路明灯。即使在最主流社区最安静的街道上，反叛的声音也会成为日常生活的背景音乐。音乐风格可能会变化和融合——它们过去一直如此，将来也将如此——但从此以后，反叛精神将以前所未有的程度决定变革的速度和范围。现在，Volk，尤其是Jungvolk（或者我们称之为青少年），已经了解了他们自己颠覆性音乐的力量，他们将坚持为其他所有人唱响旋律。

The great flip-flop had happened; now it was simply a matter of watching how it would play out over the decades. From this moment forward, symphonies and cantatas will still get composed; monarchs and popes might still offer opinions on music, or hire a favorite performer. Opera houses and concert halls won’t disappear. They will still present their familiar fare (although increasingly requiring subsidies to stay afloat), and on rare occasions might even surprise us. But when measured in money or fame or influence, their glory days have passed. Highbrow culture now recedes into the background, exerting less and less impact on the larger music ecosystem. God bless Carnegie Hall—we will still treat you with respect—but the pulse of the music world will now emanate from the Cotton Club or Birdland or Danceteria or CBGB. From this moment on, a mass audience will dictate the priorities of the music business, and it cussedly embraces the new aesthetic of the outsider and the underclass as its guiding light. Even in the most sedate streets in the most mainstream communities, the sound of rebellion will provide the soundtrack to daily life. Music styles may morph and mix—they always have and always will—but the spirit of revolt will henceforth dictate the pace and scope of change to an unprecedented degree. Now that the Volk, and especially the Jungvolk (or what we might call teenagers), have learned the power of their own subversive music, they will insist on calling the tunes for everybody else.

20

20

流散美学

The Aesthetics of Diaspora

在如今这个时刻，我几乎羞于谈论品味的培养。音乐及相关领域的评论家们往往回避这个词，认为它是令人尴尬的旧物。早在十九世纪，像约翰·罗斯金和马修·阿诺德这样自诩为品味权威的人，就以提升公众的艺术感知力为己任，他们追求这一目标的热情，如同摩西从山顶归来，带着刻在石碑上的美学原则。

I’m almost ashamed to talk about the cultivation of taste at this juncture. Critics in music and related fields tend to avoid that term as an embarrassing relic of the past. Back in the nineteenth century, self-proclaimed arbiters of taste, such as John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, made it their mission to uplift the artistic sensibilities of the public, and they pursued this goal with the zeal of Moses returning from the mountaintop with aesthetic principles carved on stone tablets.

罗斯金在从事艺术评论事业之前，曾长期考虑成为一名福音派牧师，这又有何不可？某种程度上，罗斯金从未放弃传教和点燃灵魂的使命——他只是在传教工作中用高雅文化取代了耶稣基督。马修·阿诺德则在《文化与无政府主义》的一段著名文章中声称，他的抱负无非是“追求极致的完美”，传播“世界上最美好的思想和言论” ^。1

Who can be surprised to learn that Ruskin long considered a career as an evangelical clergyman before pursuing art criticism as a vocation? In a way, Ruskin never abandoned his mission to proselytize and inflame souls—he simply substituted high culture for Jesus Christ in his missionary work. Matthew Arnold, for his part, claimed in a famous passage of Culture and Anarchy that his ambition was nothing less than “a pursuit of total perfection” that would spread the “best which has been thought and said in the world.”¹

人们普遍认为，法国社会学家皮埃尔·布迪厄（1930-2002）扼杀了培养品味的计划。布迪厄在解构品味的过程中，试图揭示其隐藏的作用。作为“势利小人和社会名流”的工具，一种封闭的心灵社区，乌合之众和工人阶级被拒之门外。富裕的精英们操纵“品味”的概念来强化自身的特权地位，并将“超然、冷漠、漠不关心”的僵化态度强加于观众与艺术的关系。在布迪厄之后，“好品味”的概念只会在批评家的口中留下恶感。甚至“品味”一词也几乎从艺术讨论中消失了^。2

It’s widely accepted that French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) killed off the project of cultivating taste. In his deconstruction of taste, Bourdieu strived to reveal its hidden role as a tool of “snobs and socialites,” a kind of gated community of the mind where riff-raff and the working class were denied admission. Wealthy elites manipulated the concept of taste to reinforce their own privileged status, and to impose stultifying attitudes of “detachment, disinterestedness, indifference” on the audience’s relationship with the arts. After Bourdieu, the notion of good taste only left a bad taste in the mouths of critics. Even the word taste has mostly disappeared from discussion of the arts.²

尽管布迪厄的模型在文化商业的诸多领域都具有启发性，但它也存在盲点。一方面，他的品味培养理论解释了当今视觉艺术面临的诸多问题。几百位富有的赞助人对画家和雕塑家的排名和声誉有着巨大的影响力，即使是世界闻名的艺术家也必须关注他们的奇思妙想。但音乐却无法将品味简化为阶级特权。几十年来，大多数音乐消费者的“品味培养”一直被唱片公司、DJ、YouTube、MTV、流媒体服务、《滚石》杂志和其他各种音乐杂志、博主、推特用户以及其他介于表演者和听众之间的中介机构所控制。强大的科技公司已经在为未来奠定基础，在未来，整个过程将被简化为算法——最好是那些能够满足其利润并扩大客户群的算法。这些组织及其随之而来的品味引领者几乎没有共同之处，但他们大多都对社交名流和百万富翁的文化偏好嗤之以鼻。事实上，如今的品味塑造者所追求的，与罗斯金/阿诺德的议程截然相反。他们很久以前就认识到，音乐的活力来自大众，或者——更确切地说——来自大众社会中那些具有超越性和颠覆性的亚文化。至少在过去一百年里，音乐品味的培养一直是一项吸收颠覆性元素并将其转化为大众市场消费品的工程。

Although Bourdieu’s model is enlightening in many fields of cultural commerce, it also has its blind spots. On the one hand, his theory of taste cultivation explains many of the problems besetting visual arts in the current day. A few hundred rich patrons exert enormous influence over the ranking and reputations of painters and sculptors, and even a world-famous artist must pay attention to their whims and fancies. But music defies this reduction of taste to class privilege. For many decades now, the “cultivation of taste” for most music consumers has been controlled by record labels, DJs, YouTube, MTV, streaming services, Rolling Stone and various other music magazines, bloggers, tweeters, and other such intermediaries between performers and listeners. Powerful tech companies are already laying the groundwork for a future in which this whole process is reduced to algorithms—preferably ones that feed their bottom line and expand their customer base. These organizations and their attendant tastemakers have little in common, but they mostly agree in their disdain for the cultural preferences of socialites and millionaires. In fact, the taste-formers of today pursue the exact opposite of the Ruskin/Arnold agenda. They learned long ago that the vitality of music comes from the masses, or—even better—from transgressive and disruptive subcultures within mass society. The cultivation of taste in music, for at least the past hundred years, has been a project of assimilating subversion and turning it into a mass-market product for consumers.

即使是富人也参与了这种颠覆。我在自身经历的文化冲突和错位中亲眼目睹了这一原则的运作。在我的早年生活中，没有什么比来自一个工人阶级家庭更能给我的精神带来困扰了。我出生于洛杉矶中南部的偏远地区——当时附近包括我在内的所有父母都没有上过大学——我以奖学金学生的身份考入斯坦福大学，后来又去了牛津大学。在接下来的几年里，我为斯坦福大学筹款，并在硅谷中心地带工作，每天都与世界上一些最富有的人打交道。我逐渐了解了他们的音乐品味（以及其他方面），而这些品味几乎总是刻意模仿那些在社会经济等级中比我低几级的人。他们的态度并不总是像丑闻缠身的商业高管马丁·什克莱利那样极端，他斥资200万美元从武当派购买了一张独一无二的嘻哈专辑，但那件事几乎可以作为当今精英阶层对待音乐态度的象征。微软联合创始人保罗·艾伦没有创办交响乐团，而是捐赠了2.4亿美元在西雅图创建了流行文化博物馆（最初的“体验音乐项目”）。女继承人多丽丝·杜克留下了10亿美元的遗赠，资助一个支持“娱乐界”歌手、舞蹈家和音乐家的基金会（据该组织网站称），但其中只字未提管弦乐队或歌剧。如今，几乎所有其他有影响力的艺术基金会都将民粹娱乐纳入其章程。布迪厄笔下的那些势利的精英们都去哪儿了？

Even the wealthy participate in this subversion. I’ve seen this principle in action firsthand in my own experiences of cultural conflict and dislocation. Nothing in my early life proved more psychically disruptive than coming from a working-class family on the cusp of South-Central Los Angeles—where none of the parents in the neighborhood, mine included, had gone to college—and arriving as a scholarship student at Stanford University and later overseas at Oxford. In subsequent years, I did fundraising for Stanford, and worked in the heart of Silicon Valley, dealing on a daily basis with some of the richest people in the world. I came to learn about their tastes in music (and other matters), and these preferences almost always involved a studied imitation of those who were several steps lower in the socioeconomic hierarchy. Their attitudes weren’t always as extreme as those of the scandal-ridden business executive Martin Shkreli, who paid $2 million for a one-of-a-kind hip-hop album from the Wu Tang Clan, but that incident could almost serve as an emblem for the posture of elites toward music today. Instead of launching a symphony orchestra, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen donated $240 million to create the Museum of Pop Culture (originally the Experience Music Project) in Seattle. Heiress Doris Duke left a bequest of $1 billion to fund a foundation that supports singers, dancers, and musicians “of the entertainment world” (according to the organization’s website), with no mention of orchestras or operas. Almost every other grant-giving arts foundation of any influence today has embraced populist entertainment as part of its charter. Where have Bourdieu’s snobbish elites all gone?

现代特权阶层的真正热情，至少在音乐领域，是“贫民窟之旅”（slumming），而非品味的培养。“贫民窟”一词作为名词流行了几十年，后来才演变成动词。这动词真是个奇怪的词：它指的是去贫困社区寻欢作乐、体验夜生活，或许还进行一些非法交易的行为。这些活动通常与某种音乐有关，而这种娱乐活动体现了一种新的美学，与布迪厄笔下那些捐助当地交响乐团的人所营造的那种傲慢自大的形象截然相反。从一开始，“贫民窟之旅”就拥有一种活力和魅力，是爱乐盛典上的一张桌子永远无法比拟的。如今，“贫民窟之旅”依然存在——尽管可能冠以不同的标签——而且如此频繁，以至于我不再惊讶于那些宣称自己热爱朋克摇滚的首席执行官，或者那些滔滔不绝地唱着嘻哈歌词的金融家们。很容易成为标准普尔500指数的成分股。事实上，考虑到这些粗犷的音乐风格几乎总是依赖于夸夸其谈、霸道和反抗的言辞，这种联系就完全说得通了。还有什么比这更能代表世界级精英的赞歌呢？贝多芬的《欢乐颂》根本无法与席德·维瑟斯高唱的《My Way》或弗雷迪·默丘里昂首阔步登上舞台高呼《We Are the Champions》相媲美。

The real passion among privileged classes in modern times, at least in music, has been slumming, not the cultivation of taste. The word slum flourished as a noun for decades before it morphed into a verb, and what an odd verb: it signified the act of visiting an impoverished neighborhood for diversion, nightlife, and perhaps a few illicit transactions. These activities frequently involved music of some sort, and the entertainment embodied a new kind of aesthetics, the exact opposite of the hoity-toity image-building cultivated by Bourdieu’s donors to the local symphony. And from the start, slumming possessed a vibrancy and allure that a table at the philharmonic gala could never match. Slumming still happens today—although perhaps under different labels—and so frequently that I no longer marvel when encountering CEOs who proclaim their love of punk rock, or financiers who spout off hip-hop lyrics as easily as components of the S&P 500. In fact, these affiliations make perfect sense when you consider that these gnarly musical styles almost always rely on a rhetoric of boasting, dominance, and defiance. What could possibly serve as a better anthem for a world-beating elite? Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” can hardly compete with Sid Vicious belting out “My Way,” or Freddie Mercury strutting onstage while proclaiming “We Are the Champions.”

在谷歌数据库中搜索五百多万本书籍和文献后发现，“贫民窟生活”（slumming）一词最早出现于19世纪80年代，除二战后短暂的沉寂外，此后一直持续流行。这个词通常带有负面含义，略带谴责那些沉迷于这些近乎丑闻式消遣的淘气富豪。而“贫民窟生活者”们自己或许更喜欢用不同的词来形容他们的活动，比如“思想开放”、“慈善事业”，甚至是“贵族义务”。针对他们的嘲笑和批评丝毫没有限制他们在下层社会寻欢作乐，反而出现了一些怪诞的机构来容纳他们的“流浪”。最臭名昭著的是20世纪30年代的哈莱姆俱乐部，它们以充斥着对非洲或南方种植园的影射的黑人娱乐节目，以及与之相得益彰的歌舞表演，取悦上流白人顾客。当时，艾灵顿公爵在哈莱姆棉花俱乐部为全白人顾客表演，他的丛林音乐常受赞誉。但那时，贫民窟文化已有半个世纪的历史了。早在1884年，《纽约时报》就已为读者提供前往“第二十街和第三十街之间的有色人种聚居区”的指南，承诺在那里漫步片刻就能到达“城里一些最底层的啤酒馆，肮脏肮脏，经常有最卑鄙的男女混混光顾” ^。3

A search of more than five million books and documents in Google’s database reveals that the term slumming first took off in the 1880s, and has continued to rise, except for a brief lull following World War II, ever since. The term typically carries negative connotations, conveying a mild reproach at the naughty nabobs who indulge in these semi-scandalous pastimes. The slummers themselves might prefer a different term for their activities, maybe open-mindedness, philanthropy, or even noblesse oblige. The jokes and criticisms leveled against them certainly do little to limit their pleasure-seeking in low places, and grotesque institutions have arisen to accommodate their treks. The most notorious were those Harlem clubs of the 1930s that delighted upper-crust white patrons with black entertainment filled with allusions to Africa or southern plantations, and packaged with appropriate songs and dances—Duke Ellington, who performed for an all-white clientele at Harlem’s Cotton Club during this period, was often praised for his jungle music. But slumming was half a century old by this point. Back in 1884, the New York Times had already offered its readers guidance to the “colored colony between Twentieth and Thirtieth streets,” promising that a short stroll there would lead to “some of the lowest beer saloons in the city, dingy and dirty, frequented by the vilest characters of both sexes.”³

但这种现象并非仅限于纽约，在大西洋彼岸也获得了更大的尊重。就在《纽约时报》推出贫民窟指南的同一年，英国期刊《笨拙》刊登了一篇讽刺文章，讲述了上流社会人士前往伦敦东区体验性诱惑、醉人和音乐的故事。但在巴黎，一种全新的商业模式应运而生，专门服务于这类顾客，创造了我们现在所见的被称为现代卡巴莱歌舞表演。在接下来的三十年里，这种夜生活形式传遍了欧洲，让柏林、维也纳、阿姆斯特丹、巴塞罗那、苏黎世、克拉科夫、布达佩斯、布拉格以及许多其他城市的上流社会人士乐在其中。到了1908年，卡巴莱歌舞表演的概念甚至传入了莫斯科，在一个名为“蝙蝠”的小地下室里开设了一家酒吧，证明了这种放荡不羁的夜生活风格在半封建的沙皇统治下也能像在法兰西第三共和国或威廉皇帝统治下的德国一样蓬勃发展。

But this phenomenon was hardly restricted to New York, and gained even greater respectability across the Atlantic. The same year the New York Times offered its guide to slumming, the British periodical Punch published a satirical article on members of the upper class who journeyed to East London for a taste of sexual intrigue, intoxicants, and music. But in Paris, a whole new kind of business emerged to serve this clientele, creating what we now know as the modern cabaret. Over the next three decades, this form of nightlife would spread throughout Europe, delighting the respectable citizens of Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Zurich, Kraków, Budapest, Prague, and many other cities. By 1908, the cabaret concept had even arrived in Moscow, setting up in a tiny cellar under the name The Bat, proving that this saucy style of nightlife could flourish as much in a semi-feudal, tsarist-led nation as in the Third French Republic or Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany.

1881 年 11 月 18 日，黑猫酒吧 (Le Chat Noir) 在巴黎蒙马特区开业，开创了这种新型音乐娱乐的模式。在这里，衣着光鲜的顾客可以与波西米亚人、艺术家、罪犯和妓女一起喝酒、欣赏现场音乐。在这个俗艳、有时甚至怪诞的环境中，贫民窟文化达到了顶峰，在优雅与堕落之间取得了必要的平衡，让收银机源源不断地响起。很快，其他场所也纷纷效仿，到 19 世纪 90 年代中期，巴黎已有 50 多家歌舞表演和十几家音乐厅，包括著名的红磨坊（1889 年开业，康康舞在此流行）和 Folies Bergère（1869 年开始展示轻歌剧和喜歌剧，但到了 19 世纪 90 年代，它以前卫的娱乐节目和半裸舞蹈吸引了更多的追随者）。

Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat), which opened in the Montmartre district of Paris on November 18, 1881, established the formula for this new form of musical entertainment. Here, well-heeled patrons could drink and enjoy live music alongside bohemians and artists, criminals and prostitutes. In this gaudy and sometimes grotesque environment, slumming reached its high point, achieving the necessary balance between elegance and depravity that kept the cash register ringing. Soon other venues followed suit, and by the mid-1890s more than fifty cabarets and a dozen music halls were operating in Paris, including the famous Moulin Rouge, which opened in 1889, where the can-can dance was popularized, and the Folies Bergère, which started out in 1869 to showcase operetta and comic opera, but by the 1890s had attracted a larger following with edgy entertainment and semi-nude dancing.

或许，衡量歌舞表演的社会文化角色最耐人寻味的指标，在​​于19世纪80年代巴黎警方登记的妓女人数急剧减少。这种下降几乎不代表法国人道德的提升；它仅仅代表着行业向这些新兴夜总会的转移，在那里，性交易的整个经济模式都披上了一层新的外衣。歌舞表演的舞女和其他员工经常兼职卖淫，而夜总会则提供了稳定的客源、达成交易的场所，有时甚至提供了在密室完成交易的机会。这对传统的性服务提供者造成了巨大的冲击，以至于一些妓院不得不将自己改造成音乐场所。

Perhaps the most intriguing measure of the sociocultural role of the cabaret can be found in the sharp reduction in the number of prostitutes registering with the Paris police during the1880s. That decline hardly indicated an improvement in French morals; it merely represented a shift in the business to these new nightclubs, where the whole economic model of sex-for-hire took on a different guise. Dancers and other employees in the cabarets often worked on the side as prostitutes, and the clubs provided a steady stream of clients, a place to strike a deal, and sometimes even the opportunity to consummate the transaction in a back room. The impact on the traditional purveyors of sex was so damaging that some brothels reinvented themselves as music venues.

然而，歌舞表演也拥有一种文化声望，使其远超妓院。爱德华·马奈曾画过一位酒吧女招待在女神游乐厅（Folies Bergère）——以现实生活中的妓女苏宗（Suzon）为模特——将她塑造成一位魅力四射、冷漠无情的女神，主宰着她职业场所的顾客和璀璨的灯光。亨利·德·图卢兹-罗特列克不仅为红磨坊舞者简·艾薇儿（Jane Avril）和其他歌舞表演的常客作画，甚至还为俱乐部设计了广告海报。这些批量生产的营销品如今在拍卖会上可以以高达10万美元的价格成交，是绘画史上最重要的高雅艺术与低俗商业交汇点之一，但如果没有欧洲夜生活基调的转变，它们几乎不可能实现。

Yet the cabaret also possessed a kind of cultural cachet that raised it far above a bordello. Édouard Manet painted a barmaid at the Folies Bergère—featuring as model a real-life prostitute known as Suzon—and transformed her into a glamorous and blasé female deity presiding over the patrons and glittering lights of her professional setting. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec not only painted Moulin Rouge dancer Jane Avril, and other regulars at the cabaret, but even designed advertising posters for the club. These mass-produced marketing items, which now can change hands for up to $100,000 at auction, rank among the most significant intersections of high art and low business in the history of painting, but they could hardly have been possible without this shift in the tone of European nightlife.

巴黎伟大和不那么伟大的作家们都能在这些场所中相遇，而不仅仅是在观众席中。早在获得诺贝尔文学奖提名之前，法国作家科莱特就曾担任音乐厅艺人，而几代不同流派和风格的作曲家都在巴黎的歌舞表演中成长——包括埃里克·萨蒂和克劳德·德彪西，他们都曾在黑猫歌舞表演厅演奏钢琴。在后来的岁月里，歌舞表演几乎推广了音乐娱乐中所有新鲜、独特或“异国情调”的事物，无论是非裔美国移民约瑟芬·贝克的舞蹈，还是明星歌手伊迪丝·琵雅芙的激情演唱，还是1937年在红磨坊上演的、在巴黎重现哈莱姆贫民窟体验的成熟棉花俱乐部歌舞表演。二十世纪的前卫音乐也从这些场所中汲取了灵感。一群具有前瞻性的法国作曲家被称为“六人组”，其中包括达律斯·米约、弗朗西斯·普朗克和阿图尔·奥涅格，他们定期在巴黎的 Le Bœuf sur le Toit 歌舞表演场所聚会，有时还会一起创作音乐。

The great and not-so-great writers of Paris could be found in these same settings, and not just in the audience. Long before she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, French writer Colette worked as a music-hall entertainer, and several generations of composers, of every genre and style, came of age in the Parisian cabarets—including Éric Satie and Claude Debussy, who both played piano at Le Chat Noir. In later years cabarets helped popularize almost anything that was new, different, or ‘exotic’ in musical entertainment, whether African American ex-pat Josephine Baker’s dancing, celebrity chanteuse Édith Piaf’s torch singing, or the full-fledged Cotton Club revue that took over the Moulin Rouge in 1937, re-creating the Harlem slumming experience in Paris. Avant-garde twentieth-century music also found inspiration in these settings. The group of forward-looking French composers known as Les Six—which included Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Arthur Honegger—met regularly at the Paris cabaret Le Bœuf sur le Toit, where they sometimes joined in the music-making.

但巴黎并非先锋歌舞表演的垄断者。苏黎世的伏尔泰歌舞表演于一战末期开业，它有时被赞誉——或许也或许被批判——为夜生活史上最狂野的俱乐部。钢琴家上方的横幅上写着“达达”（旁边是一个骷髅面具，斜视着舞台），向所有人清晰地展现了这里无政府主义的议程。在这片温室环境中凝聚起来的先锋达达运动，拒绝了达达主义不仅批判现代社会中那些好战和牟利的制度，也批判那些即使对革命者来说也同样不可或缺的逻辑和连贯性指导原则。早在朋克向社会挥舞好战的拳头之前，达达主义就试图推翻它所能触及的一切，而其主要倡导者只会嘲笑那些M&M糖果色的刺猬头，或者用安全别针代替服装首饰的浮夸之举。“达达怀疑一切，”达达主义运动的核心人物之一、诗人特里斯坦·查拉宣称——他很快补充道，达达主义甚至怀疑达达主义本身^。4

But Paris had no monopoly on cutting-edge cabarets. Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, which opened its doors in the closing days of World War I, has sometimes been praised—or chastised, perhaps—as the wildest club in the history of nightlife. A banner above the pianist proclaiming the single word “Dada” (adjacent to a skull mask leering over the stage) made clear to all and sundry the anarchic agenda at play here. The avant-garde Dada movement, which coalesced in this hothouse environment, rejected not only the war-mongering and profit-generating institutions of modern society, but also those guiding principles of logic and coherence one might think indispensable even to revolutionaries. Long before punk shook its belligerent fists at society, Dada was trying to topple whatever it could get its hands on, and its leading exponents would have simply laughed at those spiky hairstyles in M&M candy colors, or the flamboyant usage of safety pins as an alternative to costume jewelry. “Dada doubts everything,” announced poet Tristan Tzara, one of the central figures in the movement—and he quickly added that it even doubted Dada.⁴

伏尔泰酒馆（Cabaret Voltaire）的表演充斥着无意义的音节、打字机、锅盖、耙子，甚至还有一把用假弓拉奏的假想小提琴。但观众也可能和表演者一样虚无主义。在这个充斥着战争难民和激进流亡者的城市（弗拉基米尔·列宁就住在街对面），达达主义者只是众多边缘群体中的一个。我们甚至听说观众在这家酒馆里冲上舞台——这又是一个类似暴力、类似祭祀仪式的音乐表演的例子，预示着我们在接下来的篇幅中还会遇到更多类似的情况。

Performances at Cabaret Voltaire involved nonsense syllables, typewriters, pot covers, rakes, and even an imaginary violin played with a make-believe bow. But the audience could be as nihilistic as the performers. In this city of war refugees and radical exiles (Vladimir Lenin lived across the street), Dadaists were just one fringe group among many. We even hear of the audience storming the stage at this cabaret—one more example, anticipating many others we will encounter in the pages ahead, of a musical performance resembling a violent, quasi-sacrificial ritual.

这些歌舞表演场所自嘲式的名字颇具启发性。这些时尚的欧洲场所以动物为主题——蝙蝠、牛或猫——其形象令人联想到早期摇滚乐队，他们以甲虫、蟋蟀、燕鹬和乌龟命名，或者干脆简称为“动物”。这种风格融合了半认真半认真的回归自然的根基，以及对社会头衔和地位的蔑视。但很快，这种离经叛道就因其自身的优点而受到追捧，并被尊崇为一种终极艺术价值。在19世纪90年代运营于蒙马特的“虚无歌舞表演”（Cabaret du Néant，意为“空无之歌舞表演”），顾客们在巨大的木棺材上而不是桌子上吃喝，装饰中还摆放着断头台和骷髅。在地狱之歌厅（Cabaret de l'Enfer），店主承诺会带你体验地狱般的氛围——装扮成魔鬼的乐师们在一口大锅里，在真火上演奏。寻求救赎的顾客可以去隔壁的天空之歌厅（Cabaret du Ciel），那里有身着天使服装的迷人年轻女子翩翩起舞，还有司仪假装自己是圣彼得本人。朋克和后现代这两个词当时还不存在，至少在当代意义上不存在，但自诩的颓废主义和虚无主义是强大的文化力量，预示了一个世纪后蓬勃发展的许多美学原则。

The self-deprecatory names of the cabarets are revealing. These fashionable European venues took their identities from animals—a bat or oxen or a cat—in ways reminiscent of early rock bands, which named themselves after beetles and crickets, yardbirds and turtles, or just simply “the Animals.” A semi-earnest back-to-nature rootedness mixed with a disdain for social titles and distinctions. But very soon, outrageousness was courted for its own merits, and revered as a kind of ultimate artistic value. At the Cabaret du Néant (The Cabaret of Nothingness), which operated in Montmartre in the 1890s, customers ate and drank on large wooden coffins instead of tables, and the décor included guillotines and skeletons. At the Cabaret de l’Enfer (The Cabaret of the Inferno), the proprietors promised nothing less than an evocation of Hell—entertainment was provided by musicians dressed as devils performing in a large cauldron over a real fire. Patrons seeking redemption could go next door to Cabaret du Ciel (The Cabaret of the Sky), where attractive young women danced in the attire of angels, and the master of ceremonies pretended to be St. Peter himself. The terms punk and postmodern didn’t exist back then, at least not in their contemporary meanings, but self-proclaimed decadence and nihilism were powerful cultural forces and anticipated many of the aesthetic principles that would flourish a century later.

但我们主要关注的是音乐，不能让自己被断头台和圣彼得大教堂的替代品分散注意力。歌舞表演的大胆歌曲充满了讽刺和淫荡。它们可能带有政治倾向，或深入探讨色情，或仅仅追求怪诞。就在不久之前，巴黎公社——该公社于1871年以集体主义和改革的承诺控制了法国首都两个月——崩溃后，当局对音乐界实施了严格的审查制度。公共教育部长将公社的“堕落”归咎于“那个时代歌曲的狂欢”；另一位评论员将咖啡馆音乐会描述为“一种可耻的发明，像麻风病一样在我们国家蔓延”。然而，如今，这种传染病卷土重来，而且比以往任何时候都更加凶猛。在十九世纪末和二十世纪初，歌舞表演成为欧洲生活中流行音乐文化的重要中心，每个人都认识到，前卫和不敬是这一成功模式的关键因素^。5

But our main concern is with music, and we can’t allow ourselves to get distracted by guillotines and surrogate St. Peters. The bold songs of the cabarets were filled with satire and sensuality. They could take on a political bent, or delve into eroticism, or aim merely for the grotesque. Only a short while before, following the collapse of the Paris Commune—which controlled the French capital for two months in 1871 with promises of collectivism and reform—the authorities had imposed strict censorship rules on the music world. The minister of public education blamed the “depravity” of the Commune on “the orgy of songs produced during that epoch”; another commentator described the café concerts as a “disgraceful invention which is spreading across our country like leprosy.” Yet now the contagion had returned, and it was more virulent than ever. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cabaret stood out as the vital epicenter of popular music culture in European life, and everyone recognized that edginess and irreverence were the key ingredients in this successful formula.⁵

各个城市对歌舞表演和音乐厅娱乐的审查程度各不相同，并随着政治潮流的变化而变化。例如，在柏林，歌舞表演在威廉皇帝统治时期受到严格控制，在20世纪20年代变得淫秽离谱，最终在希特勒的纳粹统治下回归到陈旧的秩序。但在大多数情况下，这些场所都会突破界限，引发争议，并仅维持最低限度的体面，以防止警方将其关闭。在某些情况下，他们藐视法律，谎称表演是“俱乐部会员”或“受邀嘉宾”的私人活动，不向公众开放。在其他情况下，歌舞表演老板声称他们免受审查，因为他们经营的不是真正的剧院，只是酒吧，或者他们是准艺术非营利组织，因为无需入场费。通过各种各样的诡计和权宜之计——必要时还会采取彻头彻尾的贿赂——这些场所几十年来一直处于娱乐界的前沿。

The degree of censorship imposed on cabaret and music-hall entertainment varied from city to city, and shifted with political currents. In Berlin, for example, cabaret was strictly controlled under Kaiser Wilhelm, turned lewd and outrageous during the 1920s, and eventually retreated into stale conformity under Hitler’s Nazi regime. But in most settings, these venues pushed the limits, stirring up controversy and maintaining only the bare minimum of decency required to keep police from shutting them down. In some instances, laws were flouted through a pretense that the performances were private affairs for “club members” or “invited guests,” and not open to the general public. In other instances, cabaret owners claimed they were exempt from censorship because they weren’t operating real theaters, just pubs, or that they were quasi-artistic nonprofits, because no admission was charged at the door. By a variety of ruses and expedients—and out-and-out bribes when necessary—these venues stayed at the cutting edge of the entertainment world for decades.

1900年，如果你召集一群流行音乐领域的顶尖专家，让他们预测20世纪歌曲的演变，那些最博学的人会告诉你，这些欧洲歌舞表演将为未来一百年奠定基调。你还能在哪里找到如此性感撩人、如此大胆前卫的音乐？巴黎和柏林已经发展出这种模式，世界其他地方效仿只是时间问题。叛逆者和局外人再次站在了主导新音乐风格的前沿，你要么奋力追赶，要么被甩在身后。

In the year 1900, if you had gathered together a group of the leading experts on popular music and asked them to predict how songs would evolve during the twentieth century, the most knowledgeable would have told you that these European cabarets would set the tone for the next hundred years. Where else would you find music so saucy and sexy, so daring and au courant? Paris and Berlin had developed the formula, and it was simply a matter of time before the rest of the world followed their example. Once again, rebels and outsiders were at the forefront of a dominant new style of music, and either you raced to keep up or got left behind.

但就在此时，意想不到的事情发生了。那些专家的判断将被证明是错误的。卡巴莱并非二十世纪流行音乐的未来。另一群更加被剥夺权利、更加被鄙视的局外人，将会改变现代商业音乐的进程——并且会一次又一次地改变它。

But at this juncture something unexpected happened. Those experts would have been proven wrong. Cabaret was not the future of twentieth-century popular music. Another group of outsiders, even more disenfranchised and despised, would alter the course of modern commercial music—and then would do it again and again and again.

如今回想起来，我们才知道，美洲的黑人群体（几乎全部是奴隶的后裔）在二十世纪重塑了流行音乐。他们以多种方式重塑了流行音乐：首先是拉格泰姆和布鲁斯，然后是早期爵士乐、摇摆乐和早期的R&B，之后是灵魂乐、雷鬼、桑巴、布吉伍吉、嘟喔普、比波普、卡利普索、放克、萨尔萨、嘻哈，以及众多其他音乐流派、子流派和混合流派。即使白人音乐家们以自己独特的流行音乐风格挺身而出——无论是“英伦入侵”摇滚、迪斯科、蓝草音乐，还是其他任何在排行榜上长期或短期占据主导地位的音乐——他们几乎总是大量借鉴黑人音乐的灵感。任何欧洲歌舞表演，无论多么时尚或声名狼藉，都无法与这种创造力和创新力相媲美——这种创造力和创新力一直延续到今天。

We now know with the benefit of hindsight that the black population of the Americas, almost all of them descendants of slaves, would reinvent popular music in the twentieth century. And they did it in so many ways: first with ragtime and the blues, then with early jazz and swing and the first stirrings of R&B, and again with soul, reggae, samba, boogie-woogie, doo-wop, bebop, calypso, funk, salsa, hip-hop, and numerous other genres and subgenres and hybrid genres. Even when white musicians stepped forward with their own distinctive popular music styles—whether it was “British Invasion” rock, disco, bluegrass, or whatever else climbed the charts for longer or shorter durations—they almost always did so with heavy borrowings from black sources of inspiration. No European cabaret, however fashionable or disreputable, could compete with this outpouring of creativity and innovation—one that continues in the current day.

我们把黑人下层阶级在全球音乐产业中的胜利视为理所当然，但从任何冷静的计算来看，它都必须这堪称过去五百年音乐史上最令人叹为观止的转折。还有什么比一群来自城市边缘的贫穷且常常遭人憎恨的少数族裔——无论是在新奥尔良、密西西比三角洲、底特律、南布朗克斯、康普顿，还是其他任何地方——更令人瞩目的呢？他们的具体住址或许会改变，但社会经济现实却不会改变。他们重塑了全世界的音乐品味，并在每一个新的十年和每一代人中，以精准的规律性反复出现。这究竟是如何发生的？我们已经见证了奴隶和其他外来者以令人惊讶的方式塑造了古代和中世纪社会的音乐，但到了20世纪，当拥有众多既得利益和垄断分销渠道的强大企业控制着现代生活的主流音乐时，探究的难度无疑增加了一个数量级。如果你正在寻找音乐史上的超人壮举——或许还能洞察新的流派和风格是如何诞生的——那么这是一个值得探索的谜题。

We take the triumph of the black underclass over the global music business for granted, but by any sober calculation it must rank as the most amazing turn of events in the past five hundred years of music history. Is there anything more remarkable than a poor and often hated minority from the bad side of town—whether in New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, Detroit, the South Bronx, Compton, wherever; the specific address may change but the socioeconomic reality not so much—reconfiguring the musical tastes of the entire world, and then doing it again and again with clockwork regularity for each new decade and generation? How did that happen? We have already seen the surprising ways in which slaves and other outsiders shaped the music of ancient and medieval societies, but surely the degree of difficulty increased by an order of magnitude during the twentieth century, when powerful corporations with so many vested interests and captive distribution channels controlled the mainstream music of modern life. If you are looking for superhuman feats in music history—and perhaps some insight into how new genres and styles arise—this is a puzzle worth exploring.

非洲跨大西洋侨民的音乐创造力历史与美洲各国和各社群的奴隶制度一样悠久。或者更确切地说，它的历史甚至更久远，始于运送这些俘虏前往新大陆的船只。唱歌、跳舞和击鼓或许是自发的，但很多情况下，这些活动是由船长安排和强制执行的，船长提供这些“自由”纯粹是出于自身利益。这些船上的死亡率很高，音乐被视为对非自愿乘客健康的支持，同时也为奴隶贸易企业带来了经济回报。英国医生亚历山大·法尔肯布里奇曾在18世纪80年代参与过四次奴隶贸易航行，他指出，在这些旅程中，俘虏们“被迫跳舞”，而且“如果他们不情愿跳舞或动作不够灵活，就会遭到鞭笞”。在这种特殊环境下，音乐仅仅是鼓声，伴随着歌声。这其中没有任何美学或表现力的考量，但它却强加于人。猎鹰桥不禁从这些所谓的“中间航程”中那些“可怜的人们”的恢复性练习中，听到了“他们背井离乡的忧郁哀歌” ^。6

The history of musical creativity arising from the African transatlantic diaspora is as old as the institution of slavery in the various nations and communities of the Americas. Or, rather, it’s even older, starting on the very ships that transported these captives to the New World. Singing, dancing, and drumming might happen spontaneously, but in many instances they were scheduled and enforced by the captain, who offered these ‘freedoms’ out of sheer self-interest. Mortality rates on these ships were high, and music was seen as a support both to the health of unwilling passengers and the economic returns of the slave-trading enterprise. On these journeys, the captives were “obliged to dance,” noted British doctor Alexander Falconbridge, who took part in four slave-trading voyages in the 1780s, and “if they go about it reluctantly or do not move with agility, they are flogged.” The music in this particular setting was merely a drum, accompanied by singing. No aesthetic or expressive consideration entered into the equation, yet it imposed itself nonetheless. Falconbridge could not help hearing in these supposedly restorative exercises of the “poor wretches” of the Middle Passage the “melancholy lamentation of their exile from their native country.”⁶

这种在人类尊严遭受最极端侵犯的情况下，依然能够汲取音乐艺术精髓的能力，将成为美国音乐的永恒模式。毋庸置疑，在将超过一千万非洲人带到美洲的复杂交易和激励机制中，文化或审美考量并未发挥任何作用。在其他时代和地区，例如在阿拔斯王朝统治下的伊斯兰世界，专门从事奴隶培训和贩卖，将其作为艺人和表演者。但这种想法从未出现在跨大西洋奴隶贩子脑海中，他们只看重奴隶的体力和耐力。这些奴隶被送往美国南部，在那里他们将被用于劳动，成为农业经济的基础。然而，在美国黑人奴隶制历史的每个阶段，音乐的力量都无视各种阻碍、法规、障碍或惩罚。非洲奴隶的后代最终在他们定居的每一个地方主宰了音乐文化——事实上，早在奴隶制终结之前，黑人音乐家就已取代白人表演者。即使在种族主义最严重的社区，观众也逐渐倾向于选择他们所压迫的群体作为音乐娱乐的提供者。

This ability to extract musical artistry in the face of the most extreme violations of human dignity will be a recurring pattern in American music. Needless to say, cultural or aesthetic considerations played no role in the elaborate chain of transactions and incentives that brought more than ten million Africans to the Americas. In other times and places, businesses specialized in the training and sale of slaves as entertainers and performers—for example, in the Islamic world under the Abbasid Caliphate—but such notions would never have entered the mind of a transatlantic slave trader, who valued little beyond the strength and endurance of the human chattel in the hold. These slaves were intended for the American South, where they would be put to work as the foundation of an agrarian economy. Yet at every stage in the history of black enslavement in America, the power of the music emerged despite all hindrances, regulations, obstacles, or punishments. The descendants of African slaves eventually came to dominate the musical culture everywhere they settled—indeed, long before the end of slavery, black musicians were already displacing white performers. Even within the most racist communities, audiences gradually came to prefer the very population they oppressed as purveyors of musical entertainment.

早在17世纪90年代，奴隶提琴手就被招募到弗吉尼亚州为白人舞者表演。随后的几年里，黑人音乐家几乎掌控了南方各种场所的娱乐活动。他们为密西西比河和俄亥俄河上的汽船乘客表演，在高端度假酒店和私人派对上提供舞曲。1788年，弗吉尼亚州一位苏格兰舞蹈老师为他的学校刊登广告，他特别提到自己将使用“这片地区最好的白人音乐”——这一说法表明，他的许多竞争对手都依赖黑人表演者。在18世纪的某个时期，黑人音乐家开始向白人舞者喊出舞步和动作——这种做法如今已成为我们熟悉的乡村舞和传统民间舞蹈的常见做法，但在当时，却令许多观察者感到震惊。英国作家弗朗西丝·特罗洛普在美国期间曾接触过这种在乐队演奏台上喊话的做法，她抱怨道，这种做法“效果荒唐可笑”。在欧洲人的耳中。”一位瑞典旅行者在1832年访问波士顿时听到了类似的舞蹈召唤，他声称这是“一种比其他任何做法都更让我惊讶的做法”。正如这则轶事所示，当时的舞蹈召唤已经远远超出了南方。19世纪30年代，英国女演员范妮·肯布尔访问费城时，她失望地发现舞者不再学习舞步，而是需要召唤者来指导他们的动作。当时在费城非常受欢迎的艺人、获得自由的黑奴弗兰克·约翰逊可能就是这次的舞蹈召唤者。黑奴和前奴隶对顺从的白人大声发号施令的场面，考虑到那个时代的价值观，可能显得格格不入，甚至有些超现实，但它象征着整个美国非裔美国人音乐体验。黑人文化指引方向，白人观众跟随，即使社会其他领域的等级制度和制度保持不变^。7

As early as the 1690s, slave fiddlers were enlisted to perform for white dancers in Virginia. In subsequent years, black musicians took charge of the entertainment at virtually every kind of venue in the South. They entertained steamboat passengers on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. They provided dance music at elite resort hotels and private parties. When a Scottish dance teacher in Virginia took out an advertisement for his school in 1788, he specified his use of “the best white music that is to be had in these parts”—a claim that suggests many of his competitors were relying on black performers. And at some point in the 1700s, black musicians began calling out steps and movements to white dancers—a practice familiar to us nowadays as a staple of hoedowns and traditional folk dancing, but shocking to many observers at the time. English writer Frances Trollope, who encountered these bandstand exhortations during her stay in the United States, griped about their “ludicrous effect on European ears.” A Swedish traveler, hearing a similar dance caller during his 1832 visit to Boston, claimed that it was “a practice which surprised me more than any other.” As this anecdote indicates, dance calling had spread far beyond the South by this time. When British actress Fanny Kemble visited Philadelphia in the 1830s, she was disappointed to find that dancers no longer learned the steps but needed a caller to guide them through their motions. The freed black slave Frank Johnson, a very popular entertainer in Philadelphia at this time, may have been the dance caller in this instance. The spectacle of black slaves and former slaves barking out orders to obedient white folk may seem incongruous, perhaps even surreal, given the values of the era, but it serves as a symbol of the whole African American musical experience in the United States. Black culture provides the direction, and white audiences follow along, even as hierarchies and institutions in other spheres of society stay unchanged.⁷

古代和中世纪的统治精英认为艺人声名狼藉，很容易就接受了奴隶在音乐领域的卓越地位。对他们来说，演唱歌曲的工作就适合奴隶。然而，19世纪的美国，当看到一位才华横溢、出身贫寒的下层阶级，没有受过正规训练，甚至连像样的乐器都没有，却登上了音乐界的顶峰时，却经历了强烈的认知失调。回想一下，那是一个崇拜音乐表演者的时代，人们赋予他们超凡的诗意和精神感悟。明星制度早已在音乐界根深蒂固，报纸评论捕捉到了当时盛行的文化氛围，对当时的领军表演者——其中许多来自欧洲——赞不绝口，充满崇敬之情——充满敬意，因为美国人也对自己的文化成就深感自卑。当非洲奴隶及其后代成为美国最宝贵的音乐资源，成为对抗屈从于旧世界习俗的良药时，这无疑是一次多么可怕的冲击。如果我们从第一批 20 名非洲奴隶抵达开始计算，那么我们不应该对这一过程大约需要 300 年的时间感到惊讶。1619 年，爵士乐传入新大陆，并最终在二十世纪初期达到顶峰，引发了公众对爵士乐、布鲁斯音乐和其他非裔美国音乐风格的狂热。

The ruling elites in ancient and medieval times, who considered entertainers disreputable, easily accepted the preeminence of slaves in musical matters. The job of performing songs was, for them, fit for a slave. But nineteenth-century America experienced intense cognitive dissonance when confronted with a talented member of a dispossessed underclass who, without the benefit of formal training or even decent instruments, rose to the top of the music field. Recall that this was an era that idolized musical performers, attributing to them transcendent poetic and spiritual sensibilities. The star system was already entrenched in the music business, and newspaper reviews captured the prevailing ethos with words of breathless praise and reverent emoting targeted at the leading performers of the day—many of them from Europe, because Americans also suffered from a deep inferiority complex about their own cultural achievements. What a terrible shock it must have been when the African slaves and their descendants emerged as America’s most precious musical resource, the antidote to subservience to Old World ways. We shouldn’t be surprised that it took roughly three hundred years for this process to play out, if we measure the span starting with the arrival of the first twenty African slaves in the New World in 1619 and finally reaching critical mass with the intense public fervor for jazz, blues, and other African American musical styles in the early decades of the twentieth century.

有人可能会说，美国精英竭尽所能地延缓和阻碍本土非洲化音乐文化的兴起。但这只涵盖了故事的一半。与此同时，公众对其被剥夺权利的黑人群体的音乐表现出极大的迷恋，甚至近乎痴迷。结果，黑人音乐的阴影持续笼罩着19世纪美国白人的音乐世界。以19世纪中叶最流行的歌曲——斯蒂芬·福斯特的《哦！苏珊娜》为例。在1848年这首歌出版时，没有一首美国流行歌曲的销量超过5000张，但福斯特这首风靡一时的歌曲在发行后不久就达到了10万张的销量。这种白人模仿黑人的吟游诗人风格经常包含贬义和种族主义的歌词，我们在《哦！苏珊娜》的歌词中也经常看到这些歌词，而这些歌词如今通常会被省略。然而，这首歌的大部分内容都模仿了非裔美国人的方言风格，描述了一对分居的黑人夫妇的浪漫渴望。此处的两种元素——不宽容的偏见和感伤的情感——根本无法融合。一些评论家甚至认为歌词毫无意义或语无伦次。至少，它们体现了一种悖论，一种与上文描述的认知失调相同的悖论。但这种内在矛盾只是呼应了当时美国人心理中早已存在的冲突，反映出美国公民一方面被新大陆的非洲化音乐所吸引，另一方面又决心要维护其文化优越性。

One might say that American elites did everything possible to delay and obstruct the rise of a homegrown Africanized musical culture. But that would only capture half the story. The public simultaneously displayed a great fascination, even bordering on obsession, with the music of its disenfranchised black population. As a result, the shadow of black music constantly loomed over the musical world of nineteenth-century white America. Take, for example, the most popular song at the midpoint of the century, Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna.” At the time of its publication in 1848, no American popular song had sold more than five thousand copies, but Foster’s viral tune achieved sales of one hundred thousand copies soon after its release. This minstrel style of whites mimicking blacks frequently incorporated demeaning and racist verses, and we find those in words to “Oh! Susanna” that are usually omitted nowadays. Yet most of the song, written in a mimicked African American vernacular style, describes the romantic longing of a separated black couple. The two ingredients here, intolerant bigotry and sentimental affection, simply don’t fit together. Some commentators have gone so far as to dismiss the lyrics as nonsensical or incoherent. At a minimum, they embody a paradox, the same kind of cognitive dissonance that is described above. But this internal contradiction simply echoed the conflict already present in the American psyche of the time, reflecting a citizenry that found itself drawn to the Africanized music of the New World, yet also determined to assert its cultural superiority to it.

几年前，我写过一篇关于斯蒂芬·福斯特的文章，题为《发明美国流行音乐的骗子》。我坚持两种说法——福斯特在美国音乐创作行业建立过程中发挥的关键作用，以及他作品核心中存在的敲诈和欺骗的本质。这位词曲作者凭借关于美国南部腹地的怀旧歌曲声名鹊起，但对该地区几乎没有任何第一手的了解。他对黑人文化的流利运用是故作姿态，相比之下，白人说唱歌手香草冰（Vanilla Ice）则显得逊色不少。相比之下，这堪称真实性的典范。但在这种情况下，盗用者也被盗用了。在《哦！苏珊娜》出版后的两年里，其他16家公司发行了他们自己改编的歌曲，福斯特只能眼睁睁地看着其他人从他的音乐中牟取暴利。1864年，住在鲍厄里街一家廉价旅馆的福斯特去世，口袋里只剩下38美分。但早在《哦！苏珊娜》之前，窃取音乐知识产权就已经是美国的传统了。甚至连美国国歌都是对英国歌曲的抄袭，美国早期的音乐产业对版权和版税一无所知。在对词曲作者的法律保护开始实施很久之后，从传统民谣到搓碟打碟等各种音乐活动仍然遵循着较为宽松的规则，有时甚至没有规则。在美国历史上的大部分时间里，音乐的病毒式传播都源于抢劫，这种说法略显夸张。一些当代观察家在对YouTube和其他数字音乐供应商进行深入研究后，认为这种说法在我们这个时代依然成立^。8

Years ago, I wrote an essay on Stephen Foster titled “The Con Man Who Invented American Popular Music.” I stand by both claims—both Foster’s key role in establishing the tunesmith’s trade in the United States, and the essential elements of rip-off and deception at the heart of his craft. This songwriter built his reputation on nostalgic songs about the Deep South, but had virtually no firsthand knowledge of the region. His fluency in black culture was a studied pose that makes white rapper Vanilla Ice look like a paragon of authenticity by comparison. But in this instance the appropriator also got appropriated. In the two years following the publication of “Oh! Susanna,” sixteen other companies released their own arrangements of the song, and Foster could only watch as others reaped the financial benefits of his music. When he died in 1864, a resident of a Bowery flophouse, Foster had only thirty-eight cents in his pocket. But the robbery of musical intellectual property was already an established American tradition long before “Oh! Susanna.” Even the country’s national anthem was a rip-off on a British song, and the early music business in the United States had operated in blissful ignorance of copyright and royalties. Long after legal protections for songwriters started to be enforced, large spheres of musical activity, from traditional folk singing to scratch-and-sample deejaying, continued to play by looser rules, and sometimes none at all. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that, for most of American history, robbery is how music went viral. Some current-day observers, kicking the tires at YouTube and other purveyors of digital music, would say that’s still true in our own time.⁸

黑人音乐，无论是伪造的还是真实的，在十九世纪的美国随处可见，即使在人们很少或根本没有与非裔美国人直接接触的社区也是如此。但明星的特权和待遇只属于白人中间人和模仿者。早在19世纪20年代，像托马斯·赖斯（他以“赖斯爸爸”这个艺名重塑自我——听起来几乎像是“香草冰”乐队的前身）这样的涂黑脸的白人吟游诗人，就利用公众对歌曲的需求，创作既能唤起人们对黑人娱乐的回忆，又能对其进行嘲讽。赖斯的标志性短剧《跳吉姆·克劳》（Jump Jim Crow）中，他身穿补丁破烂的衣服，涂着黑脸，表演着他通过模仿一位残疾黑人的滑稽动作学会的怪诞歌曲和舞蹈。在十九世纪的美国，靠这样的表演真的能成就星光熠熠的事业吗？事实上，许多艺人就是这样做的。赖斯在座无虚席的剧院演出，甚至将他的表演带到了伦敦，但随着吟游表演成为当时最热门的音乐时尚，他面临着越来越激烈的竞争。

Black music, faux or real, was everywhere in nineteenth-century America, even in communities where people had little or no firsthand contact with African Americans. But the perks and privileges of stardom only went to white intermediaries and imitators. As early as the 1820s, white minstrels in blackface, such as Thomas Rice (who reinvented himself under the stage name Daddy Rice—it almost sounds like an ancestor of Vanilla Ice) were tapping into the public’s demand for songs that both evoked black entertainment while also mocking it. Rice’s trademark skit, “Jump Jim Crow,” found him dressed in patched, ragged clothing, wearing blackface, and offering a grotesque version of a song and dance he had learned by imitating the antics of a disabled black man. Could you really build a star-studded career on such stuff in nineteenth-century America? In truth, many entertainers did just that. Rice played to packed theaters and even took his show overseas to London, but faced increasing competition as minstrelsy turned into the hottest musical fad of its day.

19世纪40年代，丹·埃米特领导的弗吉尼亚吟游诗人剧团将这种娱乐形式提升到了一个新的高度，推出了成熟的演出。这些剧团通常由一群涂黑脸的演员组成，少则四人，多则十五人或更多，他们面向观众坐成半圆形。他们围绕着老套的角色和场景，表演歌曲、短剧、朗诵和笑话，并辅以其他舞台表演——可能包括轻快的步态、独幕剧或其他娱乐节目。有时，乐手会在剧团后方或乐池中伴奏，但演员们也会演奏一些典型的种植园乐器，从班卓琴到骨头乐器，应有尽有。即使在奴隶制时代，许多人也认为这是低级的娱乐活动，供下层民众欣赏。但在1844年，一个以“埃塞俄比亚小夜曲”名义演出的吟游诗人剧团收到了白宫的邀请，为总统约翰·泰勒演奏。

In the 1840s, the Virginia Minstrels, led by Dan Emmett, took this style of entertainment to the next level by introducing full-fledged shows. These typically involved a group of blackface performers, as few as four or as many as fifteen or more, seated in a semicircle facing the audience. They served up songs, skits, declamations, and jokes built around hackneyed characters and situations, supplemented by other onstage spectacles—which might include a cakewalk, a one-act play, or some other diversion. Sometimes musicians accompanied from behind or from an orchestra pit, but the cast members also played on stereotypical plantation instruments, from banjos to bones. Even in the days of slavery, many considered this as low entertainment for the rabble, but in 1844 a minstrel troupe performing as the Ethiopian Serenaders received an invitation to the White House to play for President John Tyler.

奇怪的是，观众有时会误以为这是真正的黑人音乐。当埃塞俄比亚小夜曲乐团在英国巡演时，剧团成员特意宣称他们没有“黑人血统”，甚至发布了自己没有涂黑脸的肖像来强调这一点。尽管有这些抗议，许多伦敦人仍然坚信这些来访的艺人是真正的埃塞俄比亚人。但那个时代的美国人也常常轻信，把吟游诗人的歌曲误认为是真正的黑人下层阶级的音乐。音乐出版商为了让两者难以区分，推销“种植园歌曲”合集——这个标签涵盖了各种各样的素材。我怀疑，即使在今天，许多受过教育的音乐爱好者仍然简单地认为像《哦！苏珊娜》和《坎普敦赛马》这样的歌曲是真正的黑人民谣，而完全没有意识到这些歌曲的创作过程中有多少精心的设计和伪装。在南北战争前的美国，任何寻求真正黑人音乐的人都要经历多么艰难的时期？诚然，早在19世纪40年代，以黑人艺人为主角的吟游剧团就已开始巡回演出，但即便如此，这些剧团也依然在主流文化及其黑脸竞争对手所创造的限制和期望中运作。那些热衷于收集正宗民歌的赫尔德追随者们都去哪儿了？在19世纪初的美国南部，他们拥有一座音乐素材的金矿。十九世纪。但那些民谣并非他们所属的那一类。即使一个世纪之后，当著名的民歌收藏家塞西尔·夏普和莫德·卡佩莱斯来到阿巴拉契亚山脉寻找稀有曲调时，他们也忽视了黑人、美洲原住民以及任何不符合他们所认定的值得保存的民间音乐体系的人。

Strange to say, audiences sometimes mistook this for real black music. When the Ethiopian Serenaders toured England, troupe members made a point of declaring they had no ‘black blood,’ and even released portraits of themselves without blackface to reinforce the point. Despite these protestations, many Londoners remained convinced that these visiting entertainers were actual Ethiopians. But Americans of the era were often just as credulous, mistaking minstrel songs for the genuine music of the black underclass. Music publishers made it hard to distinguish between the two, marketing collections of “plantation songs”—a label that could cover a wide range of material. I suspect that even today, many educated music lovers simply assume that songs such as “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races” are authentic black folk melodies, with no grasp of how much contrivance and dissimulation went into their creation. How much harder must it have been in the Antebellum United States for anyone seeking real black music? Yes, minstrel troupes featuring black entertainers went on the road as early as the 1840s, but even these worked within the constraints and expectations created by the dominant culture and their blackface competitors. Where were all the followers of Herder, with their zeal for collecting the authentic songs of the folk? They had a gold mine of musical material awaiting them in the American South in the early decades of the nineteenth century. But those folk weren’t their kind of folk. Even a century later, when the celebrated folk song collectors Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles came to Appalachia in search of rare tunes, they ignored blacks, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn’t fit into their schema of folk music worthy of preservation.

或许你会好奇，如果在十九世纪中叶的美国，一位才华横溢的黑人音乐家真的享受到明星般的待遇，并得到专业市场营销和推广的支持，会发生什么。事实上，我们身边就有一个例子，它堪称一个令人扼腕叹息的案例。钢琴家托马斯·威金斯，更为人熟知的绰号是“盲人汤姆”，他声名远扬，在美国乃至海外的音乐厅演出，场场爆满。他的巡回演唱会为报刊杂志带来了源源不断的专题报道和评论，盲人汤姆也因此获得了同时代其他黑人表演者无法企及的名人地位。他的演唱会收入惊人——巅峰时期每月高达5000美元，相当于今天的10万美元——但正如一位记者在威金斯生命即将结束时向读者解释的那样：“这个白痴从未得到过一分钱。”奴隶主的家人在废奴后顺理成章地成为了威金斯的法定监护人，并依靠这位钢琴家的才华致富^。9

Perhaps you wonder what would have happened if a talented black musician had actually enjoyed the perks of stardom, backed by professional marketing and promotion, during the middle decades of nineteenth-century America. In fact, we have a single example of exactly that situation, and it makes for a most melancholy case study. Pianist Thomas Wiggins, better known as “Blind Tom,” achieved widespread fame in his day, performing for packed concert halls in the United States and overseas. His concert tours generated a steady stream of feature stories and reviews in newspapers and magazines, and Blind Tom acquired a celebrity status that no other black performer of his day could approach. His concerts brought in staggering sums—as much as $5,000 a month at his peak, the equivalent of $100,000 today—but as one journalist toward the end of Wiggins’s life explained to readers, “the idiot never received a cent for his services.” The family of his slave master, who conveniently became Wiggins’s legal guardian after abolition, got rich off the pianist’s talent.⁹

托马斯·威金斯马戏团式的营销与其经济剥削一样令人不安。这位美国历史上第一位黑人明星被宣传为“白痴天才”，为好奇的观众上演一场键盘怪胎秀。音乐家的“他者化”或许与音乐本身一样古老——萨满文化甚至珍视那些表现出异常的从业者——但威金斯的剥削代表了美国生活边缘化史上尤为怪诞的一章。这种做法至少持续了一百年。才华横溢的盲人黑人音乐家几乎总是会把他们的残疾与名字联系在一起，成为他们“品牌”的一部分。威金斯于1908年去世后，音乐界推广了盲人莱蒙·杰斐逊、盲人威利·约翰逊、盲人布莱克、盲人威利·麦克泰尔和盲人男孩富勒（这真是双重打击，既是盲人又是男孩，尽管富勒并非其创始人）他是一位非常出色的音乐家（他二十多岁还在录音），还有很多其他人。近年来，当我和年轻人谈论布鲁斯传统时，他们常常对这种称呼音乐先驱的方式感到困惑，当然也感到不安。我坚持使用这些熟悉的名字，尽管我仍然想知道为什么我们不直接用他的法定名字（富尔顿艾伦）来称呼盲人男孩富勒，这个名字相当庄严，甚至适合贵族。我们当今的不安证明了我们已经取得的进步。但这只是相对的。音乐上的伟大是一种异常，常常伴有身体或精神上的耻辱，这种观念根深蒂固，无法完全消失。无论好坏，音乐家都被视为被选中的人，这是否会导致偶像崇拜和名人效应，还是恐惧和排斥，还不得而知。

The circus-like marketing of Thomas Wiggins was as disturbing as his economic exploitation. The first star black performer in American history was promoted as an “idiot savant,” a keyboard freak show for curious spectators. The othering of musicians is probably as old as music itself—shamanistic cultures even prized practitioners who demonstrated abnormalities—but Wiggins’s exploitation represents an especially grotesque chapter in this history of marginalization in American life. Such practices would continue for at least another hundred years. Talented black musicians who were blind almost always ended up with their disability attached to their name, part of their ‘branding.’ After Wiggins’s death in 1908, the music industry promoted Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Boy Fuller (a double whammy there, both blind and a boy, although Fuller didn’t start recording until his twenties), and many others. When I’ve given talks to youngsters in recent years about the blues tradition, they are often puzzled, and certainly uneasy, about this way of referring to music pioneers. I stick with the familiar names, although I still wonder why we don’t just refer to Blind Boy Fuller by his legal name (Fulton Allen), which is quite stately, even suitable for nobility. Our current-day uneasiness testifies to the progress we’ve made. But it’s only relative. The notion that musical greatness is a kind of aberration, often accompanied by physical or mental stigmata, is too deeply ingrained to disappear entirely. For good or bad, musicians are deemed chosen people, and it’s a tossup whether that leads to idolization and celebrity or fear and exclusion.

盲人汤姆几乎从一开始就经历了这两种情况。除了失明，威金斯还表现出自闭症的迹象。但这位钢琴家艰苦的成长环境无疑加剧了他的残疾。童年时期在佐治亚州，他经常被关在一个高高的木箱里——在奴隶制时代，这是一种照顾孩子的选择，因为孩子们可能会在父母工作时走失受伤。这种感官剥夺或许增强了孩子对声音的感知，但也给他的心灵和情感留下了持久的伤害。大约四岁时，这个孩子开始展现出他非凡的模仿技巧，能够模仿别人在钢琴上演奏的内容。早在十几岁之前，他就是一位游历广泛的表演者，他的公开露面总是弥漫着一种狂欢的氛围。这位音乐家的真正才华被运用到各种特技中，以展示他高超的模仿技巧。但盲人汤姆演唱会的一个主要目标也是喜剧，现存的记录强调观众经常对他在舞台上的特技表演报以残酷的笑声。

Blind Tom experienced both almost from the start. In addition to his blindness, Wiggins demonstrated signs of autism. But the harsh circumstances of the pianist’s upbringing no doubt contributed to his disability. During his childhood in Georgia, he was often confined to a high-sided wooden box—in the days of slavery, that was a childcare option for a youngster who might wander off and get hurt while parents were working. This sensory deprivation may have heightened the child’s perceptions of sounds, but it also left lasting damage to his psyche and emotions. Around the age of four, the youngster started showing signs of his extraordinary skill in imitating what he heard others play on the piano. He was a well-traveled performer even before his teens, and a carnival atmosphere surrounded his public appearances. The musician’s genuine talents were channeled into various stunts to demonstrate his skill at mimicry. But a key goal of a Blind Tom concert was also comedy, and surviving accounts stress how audiences often responded with cruel laughter to his onstage stunts.

然而，值得思考的是，威金斯在不同的时空可能会创作出怎样的作品。一位听过他十一岁演奏的观察者，曾称赞他“奇特、怪异的即兴演奏”中蕴含着“惊人的美感和悲怆”。这样的描述不禁让人联想到爵士乐——然而，这种音乐流派还要再过半个世纪才会出现。威金斯音乐天赋的这一面显然震撼了听众。一位评论家将他的表演斥为“野蛮、野蛮、种族哀歌”，而另一位想寻找描述的人则只能解释说，它们听起来像“种植园歌曲的回声”。其他记载也暗示了他们认为盲人汤姆拥有超自然和类似千里眼的力量。报纸报道证实，他能够以惊人的精准度描述他无法看见的风景，或是从鸟类和自然界中学习音乐。他通灵能力的名声传遍天下，以至于致力于揭穿招魂术的著名魔术师哈利·胡迪尼也不得不谴责盲人汤姆是个骗子。然而，显然，许多观察家相信威金斯拥有真正的精神力量，其天赋远不止弹钢琴。在其他文化中，他会成为萨满或神秘主义者。在后来，他可能会成为爵士乐或布鲁斯音乐的偶像。但在他所处的时代和环境中，这位美国音乐界的第一位黑人明星只被允许扮演两个角色：他是观众的噱头，也是老板们的摇钱树^。10

Yet it’s worth considering what Wiggins might have done in a different time and place. An observer who heard him playing at age eleven noted the “startling beauty and pathos” of his “strange, weird improvisations.” You can’t help but be reminded of jazz from this description—yet that genre wouldn’t even exist for another half century. This side of Wiggins’s musical talent evidently shook up listeners. One critic dismissed the performances as “wild barbaric, racial laments” and another, searching for a descriptor, could only explain that they sounded like “echoes of plantation songs.” Other accounts hint at the supernatural and quasi-clairvoyant powers they thought Blind Tom possessed. Newspaper stories testified to his ability to describe landscapes he couldn’t see with uncanny accuracy, or to learn music from birds and the natural world. His reputation for psychic powers spread so widely that Harry Houdini, the famed magician who worked to debunk the claims of spiritualists, felt compelled to denounce Blind Tom as a fraud. Yet it’s clear that many observers believed that Wiggins had genuine spiritual powers, and talents that went far beyond playing the piano. In another culture, he would have become a shaman or a mystic. In a later day, he could have flourished as a jazz or blues icon. But in his own time and place, this first black star of American music was permitted only two roles: he was a gimmicky stunt for audiences, and a money-maker for his bosses.¹⁰

然而，十九世纪的美国音乐迫切需要黑人音乐才能提供的东西。很难形容那个时代美国主流白人流行歌曲的平庸和压抑。你必须仔细研读成堆的客厅小调，才能理解这个国家的音乐是如何被陈词滥调的刻板和赤裸裸的原创性所侵蚀，令人麻木。在殖民时期和美国建国初期，刻板的爱国歌曲被炮制和重复使用，民族自豪感的营销者们毫不羞愧地从海外窃取旋律用于此目的。不仅仅是《星条旗永不落》，许多其他爱国歌曲都有欧洲的先例。《扬基歌》可能起源于一首荷兰的丰收歌曲。《我的祖国，属于你》抄袭《天佑吾王》的程度，几乎不亚于性手枪乐队后来的“明目张胆”之举。 《自由之歌》改编自英国皇家海军的国歌《橡树之心》。《战争与华盛顿》则直接出自《英国掷弹兵》。如此自豪于独立自主的美国人，何时才能真正在音乐中展现这种自豪感呢？

Yet American music in the nineteenth century desperately needed what only black music could offer. It’s hard to convey the banality and repression of mainstream white America’s popular songs from that era. You would have to sift through stacks of parlor tunes to grasp how mind-numbingly the nation’s music was compromised by a clichéd primness and a blatant lack of originality. During colonial times and the early days of the United States, formulaic patriotic songs were churned out and recycled, and the marketeers of nationalistic pride showed no shame in stealing melodies from overseas for this purpose. Not just the “Star Spangled Banner,” but a host of other patriotic melodies had European antecedents. “Yankee Doodle” probably originated as a Dutch harvest song. “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” rips off “God Save the King” almost as brazenly as the Sex Pistols would do in a later day. “The Liberty Song” was adapted from “Heart of Oak,” the official anthem of the British Royal Navy. “War and Washington” came straight out of “The British Grenadiers.” When would Americans, so proud of their independence, actually demonstrate it in their music?

十九世纪下半叶，美国公众的口味明显转向了情歌，但他们几乎没有实至名归。鉴于这些作品平淡无奇的内容，它们应该被称为“温柔情歌”或“感伤之歌”。在这些歌词中，你不会期待看到亲吻、拥抱或任何其他肢体接触。即使是最细微的欲望暗示，也从这些音乐中被清除殆尽。一种平淡的温柔关怀取代了激情，并以最礼貌的措辞包裹。情歌只有两种版本：快乐或悲伤，而且都遵循着套路，重复着同样平淡的情感，曲调之间几乎没有变化。甚至连另一个人作为爱慕的对象都是可选的。几乎任何古老或熟悉的东西都可以。“最常见的爱慕对象是家人或母亲的圣经、教堂、校舍、树木、花朵或家，”专门研究这类音乐的学者尼古拉斯·E·塔瓦写道。即使是比莉·霍利戴或弗兰克·辛纳屈，也很难从《旧扶手椅》或《母亲的小屋》这样的歌曲中提取出情感意义。但这正是美国人购买、学习和演唱的乐谱。与欧洲大胆的歌舞表演音乐相比，这种反差简直再明显不过了。美国人自己也敏锐地意识到了这种差距——当海外表演者被安排在美国巡演时，他们会被毫不含糊地警告，要修改他们的歌曲，避免任何可能冒犯新大陆敏感情感的歌词^。11

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the American public’s taste shifted markedly to love songs, but they hardly deserve the name. Based on the insipid content of these works, they ought to be called “songs of gentle affection,” or “songs of sentimental feeling.” Don’t expect to encounter a kiss or a hug or any other physical contact in these lyrics. Even the slightest hints of desire were purged from this music. A bland expression of tender regard takes the place of passion, and is wrapped up in the most polite terms. Only two variants of love songs existed, happy or sad, and both were written according to formula, repeating the same tepid feelings with little variation in tune after tune. Even another person as the object of affection was optional here. Almost anything old or familiar would do. “The most frequent recipients of affection were a family or mother’s Bible, a church, schoolhouse, tree, flower or home,” writes Nicholas E. Tawa, a scholar who has specialized in this music. Even Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra would be hard pressed to extract emotional significance from songs such as “The Old Arm Chair” or “The Cottage of My Mother.” But this was the sheet music that Americans purchased, learned, and sang. The contrast with the bold cabaret music of Europe could hardly be more pronounced. And Americans themselves were acutely aware of the gap—when performers from overseas were booked for tours in the United States, they were warned in no uncertain terms to clean up their songs and avoid any lyrics that might offend the delicate sensibilities of the New World.¹¹

我不能责怪词曲作者或音乐出版公司。他们只是在回应市场的需求。当时的音乐产业建立在向家庭市场兜售大量乐谱的基础上，数百万父母视演奏乐器为子女修养的标志。歌曲可以娱乐大众，但如果能提升家庭的社会地位，或帮助女儿找到合适的对象，那就更好了。情歌从未像现在这样，被吟唱出来，却从未如此缺乏诱惑力。事实上，它预期的效果恰恰相反。性爱在婚后才发生；在此之前，追求者只需坐在客厅里聆听，父母在一旁密切注视着，而心爱之人则吟唱着甜蜜而温柔的情歌。

I can’t blame the songwriters or music publishing companies. They were responding to the demands of the marketplace. The music business in this period was built on peddling reams of sheet music for the home market, where millions of parents saw playing an instrument as a mark of refinement for their children. Songs could provide entertainment, but it was even better if they raised a family’s social status or helped an eligible daughter find a good match. Never before or since had love songs been sung with less hope of seduction. In fact, the exact opposite was the intended effect. Sex came after the marriage; before that, a suitor could simply sit in the parlor and listen, with Mom and Dad closely watching over the proceedings, while the beloved sang of sweet and tender feelings.

即使这些歌曲继续找到买家，它们也会有效地阻止美国音乐产业发展成为真正的娱乐产业。歌曲可能会被当作身份的象征或相亲的道具出售，但仅此而已。这就是为什么将非裔美国人的声音融入流行音乐如此重要的原因。如果没有它，歌舞表演模式将在20世纪盛行，流行音乐将由欧洲作曲家和表演者主导。美国最受唾弃的底层阶级拯救了它，使其免于这一命运。

Even if these songs had continued to find buyers, they would have effectively prevented the American music business from evolving into a true entertainment industry. Songs would have been sold as status symbols or matchmaking accessories, but not much more. This is why the injection of African American sounds into popular music proved to be so important. Without it, the cabaret model would have prevailed during the twentieth century, and popular music would be dominated by European composers and performers. The United States was saved from this fate by its most reviled underclass.

简而言之，美国黑人被允许唱歌并非出于身份地位，而是出于其他原因，并被允许谈论所有那些在父母严加管控音乐的客厅里被禁止谈论的禁忌话题。奴隶、难民、被剥夺者和流离失所者几乎没有理由去维护他们珍视的社区价值观，他们的音乐总是探寻在其他环境中未曾言明的真理，即使这些真理需要用隐晦的语言来表达。这就是离散的美学，是只有局外人才拥有的创新力量，这一原则在19世纪的美国与古希腊人以吕底亚和弗里吉亚奴隶命名其最危险的调式时并无二致。底层阶级的这种创造力不仅重塑了艺术标准——以及从平民客厅中传出的歌声——也使美国在20世纪日益增长的全球唱片业中占据了主导地位。美国钢铁业有其安德鲁·卡内基。石油业有其约翰·D·洛克菲勒。其他行业也受益于开拓进取、面向未来的领导者。但对于音乐行业来说，奴隶的后代扮演了至关重要的角色，他们提供了愿景和方向，激发了推动商业发展的创新火花。在19世纪末期，音乐出版公司和新兴唱片业的领导者们还没有意识到这一点，但他们很快就会发现。

Put simply, black Americans were allowed to sing for reasons other than status, and permitted to address all those taboo subjects that weren’t allowed entry into the parlors where parents kept up their vigilant control of matters musical. The slave, the refugee, the dispossessed, and the displaced have few reasons to uphold cherished community values, and their music always reaches out for truths unspoken in other settings, even if they require expression in coded terms. This is the aesthetics of diaspora, the power of innovation that only the outsider possesses, a principle no different in nineteenth-century America than it was when the ancient Greeks named their most dangerous modes after Lydian and Phrygian slaves. This creative potency of the underclass would not only reshape artistic standards—and the sounds of songs emanating from the parlors of the citizenry—but also put the United States into a dominant position in the growing global recording business of the twentieth century. The American steel industry had its Andrew Carnegie. The oil industry had its John D. Rockefeller. Still other industries benefited from their pathbreaking, future-oriented leaders. But for the music industry, the descendants of slaves played this seminal role, providing the vision and direction, that spark of innovation that drives commerce. The leaders of the music publishing companies and the nascent recording business didn’t realize it yet, in those closing years of the nineteenth century, but they would find out soon enough.

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21

黑人音乐与美国生活方式大危机

Black Music and the Great American Lifestyle Crisis

二十世纪初的美国音乐中，已能嗅到20世纪60年代性革命的气息。过去几十年情歌中，情侣们不再只是温情脉脉地表达爱意，而是在乐谱中拥抱亲吻，有时甚至更大胆。美国音乐制作人第一次将情色作为自我表达的工具，甚至将其作为推销商品的渠道。

A hint of the sexual revolution of the 1960s can already be detected in American music at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead of the tame expressions of affection that characterized the love songs of previous decades, couples now hugged and kissed in sheet music hits, and sometimes dared to do even more. For the first time, American tunesmiths embraced eroticism as a tool of self-expression—and even more, as a way to sell their wares.

但这些淫秽歌曲中，大多只出现了黑人情侣。如果你用歌词或流行乐谱封面上的图画来评判世纪之交的美国道德，你可能会认为美国的通奸行为仅限于非裔美国人。然而，这些歌曲中有很多都卖得很好，证明了当时的听众的品味跨越了种族界限，尤其是在涉及性感音乐的时候。乔治·M·科汉的《最温暖的宝贝》（The Warmest Baby in the Bunch）对1897年的音乐有着强烈的暗示，其中描述了一个“婴儿”让另一个……“姑娘们感到寒冷”和“她像个热气腾腾的暖气片”，以至于“在寒冷的十二月，她的鞋子里都冒着热气”。身体接触在过去几十年的客厅歌曲中是禁忌，而现在却进入了美国情歌的词汇表，但没有人抱怨，因为乐谱封面上的黑人情侣插图清楚地表明，只有肤色较黑的人才会出现这种过度的体温。第二年，查尔斯·E·特雷瓦森创作的《唇上沾满蜜糖》也是如此。在这里，一对黑人情侣接吻和抚摸的插图使这首尖锐的歌曲可以被商业接受。休吉·坎农 1902 年的《比尔·贝利，你不回家吗？》甚至暗示了通奸，但乐谱插图再次让消费者知道，这位风流倜傥的贝利先生，一个衣冠楚楚、目光淫荡、戴着时髦软呢帽的男人，是黑人。所以，把他的不忠写进曲子里当然是可以的。

But only black couples, for the most part, showed up in these salacious songs. If you were to judge turn-of-the-century American morals by the lyrics or the pictures on the covers of popular sheet music, you might assume that fornication in the United States was limited to the African American populace. Yet many of these songs were big sellers, testifying to an audience whose tastes cut across racial divides, especially when sexy music was involved. “The Warmest Baby in the Bunch,” by George M. Cohan, was highly suggestive for 1897, with its description of a “baby” who made the other “wenches take a chill” and was “such a hot radiator” that “steam comes from her shoes in cold December.” Body contact, taboo in the parlor songs of previous decades, had now entered the vocabulary of the American love song, but no one complained, because the illustration of a black couple on the cover of the sheet music made clear that such excessive body heat was limited to dark bodies. The same was true of “Honey on My Lips,” composed by Charles E. Trevathan, from the following year. Here, illustrations of a black couple kissing and groping made an edgy song acceptable for commerce. Hughie Cannon’s “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey,” from 1902, even hinted at adultery, but again, the sheet music artwork let consumers know that the philandering Mr. Bailey, a dapper man with a leering gaze and wearing a stylish fedora hat, was black. So of course it was okay to put his infidelities into a tune.

这首歌大获成功，并启发了许多衍生作品。比尔·贝利（Bill Bailey）发展成为一个品牌特许经营权（用当代的说法）。你几乎可以把他描述成某种黑人民间传说中的英雄，类似于约翰·亨利（John Henry），在他孜孜不倦的卧室生涯中，使用的不是锤子，而是远没有锤子那么沉重的工具。事实上，这首歌的真正灵感来源——威拉德和莎拉·贝利——是密歇根州杰克逊市的白人居民，但在当时的美国音乐界，市场简单地认为歌曲中任何性或低俗的内容都必然指向黑人底层阶级。

This song became a huge hit and inspired many spin-off compositions. Bill Bailey grew into a brand franchise (in the contemporary parlance). You could almost describe him as a kind of black folklore hero, akin to John Henry, working not with a hammer but a far less burdensome tool in his tireless bedroom vocation. In fact, the actual couple who inspired the song, Willard and Sarah Bailey, were white residents of Jackson, Michigan, but at this point in American music, the marketplace simply assumed that anything sexual or tawdry in a song had to refer to the black underclass.

以现在被称为《弗兰基和约翰尼》的歌曲为例，这首歌最初由坎农于1904年出版，原名《他做错了我》，副标题是《比尔·贝利之死》。这首歌讲述了一个令人震惊的故事，通奸后发生了冷血谋杀。这个故事的历史背景仍有争议——它的起源可能可以追溯到19世纪初——但这个故事并没有要求主角必须是黑人。然而，乐谱上再次出现了一对非裔美国夫妇的形象。1936年，艺术家托马斯·哈特·本顿在密苏里州议会大厦的壁画中，创作了一个以这对著名情侣为主角的酒吧场景，这是一个引人深思的事件。壁画中，一名愤怒的女子近距离向一名男子的臀部开枪。一些州议员对这幅画面感到非常震惊，以至于一项法案被介绍去粉刷这对违规夫妇。虽然壁画得以保留，但值得注意的是，这些投诉与粗俗的主题或对性和暴力的暗示无关。主要市民只是对一幅黑人画像出现在政府大楼的墙上感到愤慨。相比之下，他们行为的不雅之处却被视作理所当然。

Take, for example, the song now known as “Frankie and Johnny,” originally published by Cannon in 1904 as “He Done Me Wrong,” with the subtitle “Death of Bill Bailey.” This song contains a scandalous story of adultery followed by cold-blooded murder. The historical antecedents of the story are still debated—its origins may date back to the early nineteenth century—but there is nothing in this tale that requires the protagonists to be black. The sheet music, however, again presents an image of an African American couple. In a revealing incident from 1936, artist Thomas Hart Benton included a saloon scene featuring these famous lovers in his murals for the Missouri State Capitol Building. Here an angry woman is shown firing a gun at close range into a man’s hindquarters. Some state legislators were so shocked by this image that a bill was introduced to paint over the offending couple. Although the mural was saved, it’s worth noting that the complaints had nothing to do with the rude subject matter or the allusions to sex and violence. Leading citizens were simply indignant that a painting of black people had appeared on the wall of a government building. The indecorous aspects of their doings, in contrast, were simply taken for granted.

这些歌曲出自白人作曲家之手，他们继续充当着大多数关于非裔美国人主题的流行音乐传播到普通大众的渠道。在奴隶制结束后的几年里，黑人音乐开始找到表达的平台，并获得了些许尊严，但这种新获得的尊重几乎完全局限于强化主流文化价值观的宗教音乐。我们几乎在内战结束后立即看到了这种转变，当时三位白人废奴主义者编辑的《美国奴隶歌曲》 （1867 年）发行，同年一神论牧师托马斯·温特沃斯·希金森在《大西洋月刊》上发表了一篇关于“黑人灵歌”的颇具影响力的文章。这些歌曲收藏家似乎认为黑人音乐很少脱离基督教主题。“几乎所有歌曲都带有彻底的宗教色彩，”希金森在描述黑人音乐时坚持认为，他借鉴了自己在内战中领导第一支获得授权的非裔美国人军团的经历。《美国奴隶歌曲》的编辑们为未能收录更多世俗歌曲道歉，但也解释说这些歌曲非常罕见。他们还向读者保证，“黑人音乐具有文明的特质”，因为它“部分是在与白人交往的影响下创作的”，其中很少有“本质上野蛮的” ^。1

These songs came from white composers, who continued to serve as the channel by which most popular music about African American topics reached the general public. In the years following the end of slavery, black music started to find platforms for expression that presented it with a modicum of dignity, but this newfound respect was restricted almost entirely to religious music that reinforced the values of the mainstream culture. We see this shift almost immediately after the end of the Civil War with the release of Slave Songs of the United States (1867), compiled by three white abolitionists, and the publication that same year of an influential article on “Negro Spirituals” by Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson in The Atlantic Monthly. These song collectors seemed to believe that black music rarely departed from Christian themes. “Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in tone,” Higginson insisted in his description of black music, drawing on his experience leading the first authorized African American regiment in the Civil War. The editors of Slave Songs of the United States apologized for not including more secular songs in their collection, but explained that these were very rare. They also assured their readers that “negro music is civilized in character” because it is “partly composed under the influence of association with whites,” and very little of it is “intrinsically barbaric.”¹

19世纪70年代菲斯克禧年合唱团的巨大成功证明了，由真正的非裔美国乐团演奏的黑人音乐的精神层面，也能在音乐厅中蓬勃发展。然而，在很早的时候，一些评论家就质疑了这些歌曲的真实性。1881年《皮奥里亚日报》的一篇文章抱怨说，音乐厅里的圣歌“失去了真正的黑人音乐那种狂野的节奏、野性的旋律和激情”，并且“带有……的味道”。北方。”关于这种音乐的合法性，包括其起源和目的，至今仍在争论中，尽管没有贬义的暗示。我怀疑我们是否永远无法就非洲元素在非裔美国圣歌中出现的程度达成完全共识。但认为这些歌曲仅仅反映了主流文化价值观的说法实在是不可当真。你无需成为解码隐藏信息的专家，就能在圣歌中找到潜在的含义，这些含义与圣经文本中反复出现的奴隶制、苦难和解放主题有关。在不同的时代和地点，这些经文段落向统治精英和被压迫群体传达了截然不同的含义——例如，天主教作曲家威廉·伯德和托马斯·塔利斯可以引用圣经段落来描述英国被鄙视的“教皇”的苦难，而不会冒犯他们的反罗马庇护人伊丽莎白女王。这些对压迫的控诉在传统的非裔美国圣歌中随处可见^。2

The enormous success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s proved that the spiritual side of black music performed by actual African American ensembles could also flourish in concert halls. Yet at a very early juncture, some critics questioned the authenticity of these songs. An article in the Peoria Journal in 1881 complained that concert hall spirituals had “lost the wild rhythms, the barbaric melody, the passion” of real black music and “smack of the North.” The debate continues to this day on the legitimacy of this music, as to both its origins and its purposes, although without the pejorative insinuations. I doubt we will ever reach full consensus on how much of Africa shows up in African American spirituals. But the notion that these songs simply reflected the values of the dominant culture can’t really be taken seriously. You don’t need to be an expert in decoding hidden messages to find the latent meanings in spirituals that referenced the recurring themes of slavery, suffering, and liberation in sanctioned biblical texts. In various times and places, these scriptural passages have conveyed very different significations to ruling elites and oppressed groups—for example, when Catholic composers William Byrd and Thomas Tallis could reference biblical passages that described the suffering of the despised ‘papists’ in England without displeasing their anti-Rome patron Queen Elizabeth. These complaints against oppression are pervasive in the traditional African American spirituals.²

有时，黑人圣歌中的社会政治象征对所有听众来说都显而易见。当《摩西下去》的歌词与“让我的人民离开”的呼声相呼应时，听众无需运用高超的密码破译技巧就能理解，这首哀歌超越了人们对法老和古埃及的历史担忧。圣歌《偷走》表面上是关于摆脱尘世的束缚，与耶稣一起去一个更美好的世界，但这个更美好的世界显然也指任何不受奴隶主和监工控制的可到达的目的地。其他圣歌在其替代含义上则更为微妙。诸如《摇摆吧，甜蜜的战车》和《涉水》等歌曲被解读为对地下铁路的暗指，地下铁路是一套安全屋和秘密路线系统，将奴隶带到北方的自由之地。当然，这些歌曲在很多情况下，甚至在大多数情况下，也表达了对信仰和宗教情感的真挚表达。但即使我们无法精确地确定具体歌手的动机和意图，很明显，两种层次的意义并存，而且相处得非常融洽。鉴于长期以来受压迫的个人身兼两职，作为音乐创新者，我们不应该对这种灵活性感到惊讶。抗议歌曲并不总是宣扬其抗议，而且常常展现出对当局指令和价值观的非凡适应性。

Sometimes the sociopolitical symbols in black spirituals were obvious to all hearers. When the words of “Go Down Moses” resounded with the demand “Let my people go,” listeners didn’t need to apply advanced code-breaking skills to grasp that the lament rose above historical concerns with pharaohs and ancient Egypt. The spiritual “Steal Away” is ostensibly about leaving earthly constraints behind and joining Jesus in a better place, but that better place was obviously also any reachable destination outside the control of slave-drivers and overseers. Other spirituals were subtler in their alternative meanings. Songs such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Wade in the Water” have been interpreted as coded references to the Underground Railroad, that system of safe houses and secret routes that brought slaves to freedom in the North. Of course, these songs also served as heartfelt expressions of faith and religious sentiment in many, perhaps even most, situations. But even if we can’t determine with any precision the motivations and intentions of specific singers, it’s clear that two levels of meaning coexisted, and did so very comfortably. Given the long history of downtrodden individuals doing double duty as musical innovators, we should hardly be surprised by this flexibility. Protest songs do not always advertise their protestations, and often reveal extraordinary adaptability to the dictates and values of the authorities.

但二十世纪初的美国音乐对黑人音乐家的要求远不止宗教歌曲和加密信息。美国或许正在全球范围内展现其军事和经济实力——最近的美西战争证明，北方佬只需十周就能战胜一个曾经的旧大陆殖民者——但其统治阶级的音乐文化仍然是陈腐公式和拙劣模仿的混合体。大约在这个时候，黑人表演者开始接触到更能接受更刺耳、更叛逆音乐的观众，但这与包容性和种族和谐几乎无关。美国主流渴望的只有这种新音乐——首先是拉格泰姆，后来是爵士乐和布鲁斯——才能带来的兴奋。这种早期的（我们现在可以称之为）“另类音乐”其实早已存在，但只是边缘化或被隐藏在人们的视野之外。不妨想想作曲家巴西尔·巴雷斯（1845-1902）这个奇特的例子。他是一位在十九世纪新奥尔良创作古典音乐的黑人。他为大众创作的都是些平庸的伤感圆舞曲，但最近，一部名为《钟楼》（Los Campanillas）的未出版作品重见天日。这首非凡的乐曲至今仍鲜为人知，它以萦绕心头的忧郁旋律和哈巴涅拉节奏为特色，而WC·汉迪后来在其热门歌曲《圣路易斯布鲁斯》（St. Louis Blues）中也运用了这种节奏。我们只能猜测巴雷斯创作这首乐曲的境况，但一位出身奴隶的黑人作曲家会将自己非同寻常的音乐作品秘而不宣，这又何足为奇呢？讽刺的是，与巴雷斯同时代的新奥尔良白人作曲家路易斯·莫罗·戈特沙尔克（Louis Moreau Gottschalk）比巴雷斯拥有更多从非洲文化中汲取灵感的自由。但这种情况很快就会改变，而改变的根本原因在于：消费者需求。

But American music at the dawn of the twentieth century required more from black musicians than religious songs and encrypted messages. The United States might have been flexing its military and economic power on a global scale—the recent Spanish-American War proved that Yankees could triumph over a former Old World colonizer in just ten weeks—but the musical culture of its ruling class was still a tepid mixture of stale formulas and clumsy imitations. Around this time, black performers started encountering audiences receptive to more jarring and rebellious music, but this had little to do with tolerance and racial harmony. Mainstream America craved the excitement that only this new music—first ragtime, and later jazz and blues—could provide. This early breed of (what we might now call) ‘alt music’ had existed before, but only on the fringes or hidden from view. Consider the curious case of composer Basile Barès (1845–1902), a black man who wrote classical music in nineteenth-century New Orleans. For the public he composed sentimental waltzes of little distinction, but more recently, an unpublished work titled “Los Campanillas” has come to light. This extraordinary piece, still little known, features a hauntingly melancholy melody and the same habanera rhythm W. C. Handy would later employ in his huge hit “St. Louis Blues.” We can only guess at the circumstances under which Barès created it, but who can wonder that a black composer born as a slave would keep his less conventional music under wraps? It is ironic that a white New Orleans composer of the same era, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, had more freedom to draw on Africanized sources of inspiration than Barès did. But that would soon change, and for the most powerful of reasons: consumer demand.

我不禁想起罗马外交官普里斯库斯讲述的一段轶事。公元448年，普里斯库斯访问了匈奴王阿提拉的宫廷。这位经验丰富的罗马皇帝代表震惊地发现，在如此凶猛的敌人面前，当他视其为神圣时，迎接他的是一位穿着粗鲁的斯基泰人服装、能说一口流利希腊语的男子。普里斯库斯困惑地得知，对话者是一位在罗马人中出生长大的商人，但他认为与“野蛮人”生活比在“文明人”中更好。两人随后就这两种截然不同的生活方式的比较优势展开了激烈的辩论。这种现象在古代世界很少见，但在后来的帝国和殖民者中却十分常见，甚至有了一个名字：入乡随俗。即使在今天，也没有什么比这种基层民众的效忠转变更让霸权国家感到恐惧的了。统治者应该积极应对，因为它无异于一种极具传染性的对主流价值观的精神背叛。人们正在向被殖民者的观点和行为方式靠拢，而不是殖民者。一旦这种感染开始蔓延，世界上所有的军事实力和经济影响力都无力阻止其影响。

I can’t help recalling an anecdote shared by the Roman diplomat Priscus, who visited the court of Attila the Hun in the year AD 448. This seasoned representative of the Roman emperor was shocked when, in the midst of these fierce enemies to everything he held sacred, he was greeted by a man in rude Scythian attire who was fluent in Greek. Priscus learned, to his befuddlement, that his interlocutor was a merchant who had been born and raised among Romans, but had decided that life was better with the “barbarians” than in “civilization.” The two proceeded to debate in passionate exchanges the comparative advantages of these opposed ways of life. This phenomenon, rare in the ancient world, would become so common among later empires and colonizers that it even received a name: going native. And few things are more feared by dominant powers even today than this sort of switch of allegiance at the grassroots level. Rulers do well to combat it, because it represents nothing less than a highly contagious psychic treason to prevailing values. People are aligning themselves with the views and manners of the colonized rather than those of the colonizers. Once this infection begins to spread, all the military strength and economic clout in the world is powerless to halt its influence.

世纪之交，类似的东西进入了美国音乐文化。黑人音乐曾因其粗俗而被嘲笑，如今却公开吸引着听众，尤其是年轻人，承诺提供一种打破既定传统的替代方式。如今，我们已经超越了贫民窟，进入了一种生活方式危机，尽管“危机”这个词在 1900 年并不存在。这种转变的中心在早期是拉格泰姆。这个标签，就像后来的嘻哈、朋克或乡村音乐一样，代表的不仅仅是一种音乐流派，还涵盖了广泛的文化符号和活动。至少早在 19 世纪 90 年代，“拉格泰姆”一词就开始被赋予新的含义。有时它指一种音乐；在其他情况下，指一种舞蹈。用作家鲁珀特·休斯在 1899 年的话来说，拉格泰姆是“一种狂热，舞者和观众不时发出欢呼声”。这些含义与源自古英语“raggig”的一系列词汇的历史相联系，这些词汇衍生出了诸如“raggedy”、“ragpicker”、“ragamuffin”以及其他暗示堕落、粗鲁、贫穷和彻头彻尾邪恶的词汇。十四世纪寓言《农夫皮尔斯》中的“拉格莫芬”就是魔鬼本人——而撒旦会在二十世纪黑人音乐中以许多意想不到的语境出现，尤其是在如果你想演奏布鲁斯音乐，可以和他讨价还价的人。甚至在19世纪90年代末之前，“rag”这个词就已经指代一个真实存在的事件，一种世纪末美国少年犯的狂欢派对。1893年堪萨斯城的一篇新闻报道描述了一起发生在“rag”酒吧的枪击事件，导致一名白人男子和一名黑人男子同时死亡。这里的种族融合很有意思。即使在一个高度种族隔离的世界里，一些白人社会也感受到了“ragging”（嘲笑）^的诱惑。3

Something of this sort entered into American musical culture at the turn of the century. Black music, once ridiculed for its crudeness, now openly enticed listeners—especially young ones—with its promise of an alternative to established conventions. We have now gone beyond slumming and arrived at a kind of lifestyle crisis, although that word didn’t exist back in 1900. The epicenter of this shift, in its early stages, was ragtime. This label, much like hip-hop, punk, or country in later decades, represented more than just a music genre, encompassing a wide array of cultural signifiers and activities. At least as far back as the 1890s, the word rag started taking on new meanings. Sometimes it referred to a kind of music; in other instances, to a dance. In the words of the writer Rupert Hughes in 1899, the rag was “a sort of frenzy with frequent yelps of delight from the dancer and the spectators.” These meanings linked up with a whole history of terms derived from the Old English raggig, which had spawned words such as raggedy, ragpicker, ragamuffin, and others suggesting degradation, roughness, poverty, and outright evil. Ragamoffyn in the fourteenth-century allegory Piers Plowman is the devil himself—and Satan will show up in many unexpected contexts in twentieth-century black music, not least as a person you could negotiate with if you wanted to play the blues. Even before the end of the 1890s, rag could refer to an actual event, a kind of rave for fin de siècle American delinquents. A Kansas City news report from 1893 describes a shooting that took place “at a rag” that left both a white man and a black man dead. The racial mix here is interesting. Even in a highly segregated world, some segment of white society felt the allure of ragging.³

拉格泰姆 (或现称拉格泰姆) 作为一种通常用钢琴演奏的音乐风格，发挥了其最大的商业影响力，但其影响力迅速蔓延到以弦乐器或管乐器为主的合奏。这种音乐在今天的许多听众看来可能有些古雅或老式，适合作为历史电影的配乐。但在早期，拉格泰姆并非如此。这种新流派的实践者采用了一种称为切分音的简单节奏技巧，即将重音放在节拍之间而不是节拍上，并将其推向了西方音乐中前所未有的极致。在拉格泰姆中，切分音无处不在。许多拉格泰姆旋律极难吹奏或哼唱，但这对表演者和观众来说并不重要。其目标是保持节奏的位移，为音乐注入一种不安分、不平衡的能量，这是华尔兹或四对方舞曲无法比拟的。

Rag (or ragtime, as it was now called) exerted its greatest commercial influence as a style of music typically played on piano, but its influence quickly spread to ensembles featuring string or wind instruments. This music perhaps sounds quaint or old-fashioned to many listeners today, suitable for the soundtrack of a period historical movie. But that wasn’t how ragtime was heard in its early days. Practitioners of this new genre took a simple rhythmic device known as syncopation, which involves placing heavy accents between the beats rather than on the beat, and pushed it to extremes not previously heard in Western music. In ragtime, syncopation is happening constantly. Many ragtime melodies are extremely difficult to whistle or hum, but that hardly mattered to the performers or their audiences. The goal was to keep the rhythmic displacements coming, imparting a restless, off-kilter energy to the music that no waltz or quadrille could match.

新音乐风格的起源几乎在所有情况下都难以确定确切的日期。它们诞生于边缘地带和异域，远离公众的关注和专家（他们总是姗姗来迟）的审视。但拉格泰姆几乎肯定遵循了创新从丑闻和禁忌活动中心涌现的循环模式。传统的记载讲述了拉格泰姆的早期萌芽是如何在1893年芝加哥举行的世界哥伦布纪念博览会上听到的。这场盛大的博览会占地六百英亩，涵盖了两百栋建筑。然而，这份谱系给拉格泰姆蒙上了一层不应有的尊贵光环，因为它在任何官方文件或博览会记录中均未提及。在历史的这一刻，你或许可以在芝加哥听到拉格泰姆——毕竟，各种风格和流派的音乐家都涌向这座城市，从博览会的参与者身上赚钱——但你最好的机会是……去过酒吧或妓院，尤其是在密苏里州南环路的红灯区Levee。几年后，当拉格泰姆音乐成为密苏里州一种值得关注的区域性音乐风格时，同样的夜生活协会也占据了主导地位。拉格泰姆音乐专家爱德华·A·柏林在拉格泰姆音乐盛行时期绘制了塞达利亚和圣路易斯的街道地图，他发现，在早期，拉格泰姆音乐经常作为卖淫和酗酒的背景音乐，甚至可能还伴有许多其他社会恶习^。4

The origins of new musical styles resist precise dating in almost every instance. They arise from the fringes and outliers, away from the limelight and the scrutiny of experts (who always arrive late on the scene). But ragtime almost certainly followed the recurring pattern of innovation emerging from centers of scandal and forbidden activities. The conventional accounts tell how early stirrings of ragtime could be heard at the World’s Columbian Exposition, a massive fair that spread over six hundred acres and two hundred buildings in Chicago in 1893. Yet this genealogy casts an undeserved luster of respectability on ragtime, which is not mentioned in any official documents or accounts of the exposition. You probably could hear ragtime in Chicago at this moment in history—after all, musicians of every style and genre flocked to the city to make money off fair attendees—but your best chance would have been at a saloon or a brothel, and especially in the Levee, the red-light district in the city’s South Loop neighborhood. A few years later, when ragtime emerged as a noteworthy regional style in Missouri, the same nightlife associations predominated. The ragtime expert Edward A. Berlin, who created street-by-street maps of Sedalia and St. Louis during the period of the music’s ascendancy, found that rags frequently served as a soundtrack to prostitution and intoxication, and probably a host of other social vices as well, in its early days.⁴

这种联系在当时最著名的拉格泰姆乐曲——斯科特·乔普林的《枫叶拉格》——的名字中得到了颂扬。这首乐曲在 1899 年将这种新的音乐风格推向了全国性的风潮。许多人认为这首乐曲的名字来源于密苏里州的本土枫树，或者是为了纪念加拿大，并暗指加拿大国旗上的枫叶。但事实并非如此。枫叶俱乐部——斯科特·乔普林招待顾客的地方——几乎可以肯定是这首乐曲名字的来源。这家社交俱乐部在塞达利亚是一个颇具争议的场所，引发了黑人传教士的抗议，他们希望市政府关闭这个饮酒、跳舞、赌博的中心，用一位评论家的话来说，“还有其他不道德的行为，可耻得不提”。当局最终在 1900 年关闭了该俱乐部，但值得注意的是，即使在短暂的存在期间，这家非裔美国人社交俱乐部也吸引了白人顾客。我怀疑他们对拉格泰姆音乐的赞助并非出于对种族宽容和平等的热情——这与其说是塞达利亚盛行的开明社会态度，不如说是拉格泰姆音乐的魅力所在。因此，即使在早期阶段，我们也能略微窥见创新型黑人音乐在促进美国种族融合方面可能发挥的作用，尽管这种作用有时是无意中产生的^。5

This connection is celebrated in the very name of the most famous ragtime composition of the era, Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” which helped turn the new music style into a nationwide phenomenon in 1899. Many people assume this piece is named for the maple trees native to Missouri, or perhaps honors Canada, and references the leaf emblazoned on that country’s flag. The truth is less decorous. The Maple Leaf Club, where Scott Joplin entertained patrons, is almost certainly the source of the composition’s title. This social club was a controversial establishment in Sedalia, stirring up protests by black preachers, who wanted the city to close this center of drinking, dancing, gambling, and, in the words of one critic, “other immoral practices, too disgraceful to mention.” Authorities eventually shut down the operation in 1900, but it’s worth noting that even during its brief tenure this African American social club also attracted white customers. I doubt that a zeal for racial tolerance and equality inspired their patronage—which testified more to ragtime’s allure than to enlightened social attitudes prevalent in Sedalia. Thus, even at this early stage, we get a hint of the role that innovative black music could play, sometimes inadvertently, in furthering integration in the United States.⁵

《枫叶拉格》这首乐曲比创作它的俱乐部享有更长久、更大的名声和影响力。乔普林的出版商约翰·斯塔克夸口说，乐谱卖出了一百万份。他或许有些夸张，但无论以何种标准衡量，《枫叶拉格》都取得了巨大的成功。然而，斯塔克本人最初也曾怀疑这首乐曲的商业吸引力。据说，他第一次听到这首歌时就回应道：“太难了。没人会……能够演奏它。” 即使是基本的钢琴拉格泰姆也存在技术挑战，既需要左手快速跳跃的动作（通常保持在节拍上），也需要右手叠加复杂的切分音模式。但乔普林的突破性作品比普通的拉格泰姆练习曲更难，许多购买了乐谱的人在尝试演奏时一定以失败告终。然而，美国佬的聪明才智拯救了这一切。在拉格泰姆音乐的辉煌时期，对自动钢琴的需求迅速增长，自动钢琴是血肉表演者的机械替代品，它预见了我们当今对机器人接管人类工作的许多痴迷。很难想象如果没有这种技术推动，拉格泰姆会产生同样的文化影响力^。6

The composition “Maple Leaf Rag” enjoyed a much longer—and greater—fame and influence than the club that spawned it. Joplin’s publisher, John Stark, boasted that the sheet music sold a million copies. He may have exaggerated, but the “Maple Leaf Rag” was a huge success by any measure. Yet Stark himself had originally doubted the composition’s commercial appeal. “It’s too difficult,” he allegedly responded at first hearing it. “Nobody will be able to play it.” Even rudimentary piano rags present technical challenges, both in the fast leaping motions required of the left hand, which typically stays on the beat, and the complex syncopated patterns superimposed by the right hand. But Joplin’s breakthrough piece was more difficult than your garden-variety ragtime workout, and many who purchased the sheet music must have failed miserably in their attempts to play it. Yankee ingenuity, however, came to the rescue. Demand for player pianos, a mechanical substitute for a flesh-and-blood performer that anticipated many of our current-day obsessions with robots taking over human jobs, was rising rapidly during the glory years of ragtime music. It’s hard to imagine ragtime having the same cultural impact without this technological boost.⁶

伟大的非裔美国拉格泰姆作曲家是否因其创新而受到赞扬？确实如此，但同样，合法化也是在事后很久才实现的——这是本文反复出现的主题。斯科特·乔普林于 1917 年去世，1976 年获得了普利策奖。在他生前，拉格泰姆音乐是一种丑闻。但这正是美国主流社会想从黑人音乐中得到的：尝尝禁忌的味道。1900 年，著名音乐杂志《练习曲》斥责拉格泰姆是一种“剧毒”和“疟疾”，它“损害了年轻人的大脑，使其怀疑自己的心智”。拉格泰姆还遭到了许多其他指责。维护既有价值观的人声称，拉格泰姆只是噪音。它的声音单调而令人沮丧。它出现在体面的场合是一种亵渎。训练有素的音乐家们正被那些未经训练的冒牌货抢走工作。如果你听拉格泰姆音乐的时间足够长，你甚至可能会发疯。但这类音乐剧变所引发的最大担忧几乎总是与性有关。这些担忧通常不言而喻，但《音乐信使》的一位作者向他的读者阐明了这一点：他宣称，拉格泰姆“象征着黑人原始的道德观和明显的道德局限。对于后者来说，性克制几乎是未知的。” ⁷

Were the great African American composers of ragtime praised for their innovations? That did happen, but here again, legitimization only took place long after the fact—a recurring theme in these pages. Scott Joplin, who died in 1917, got a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976. During his lifetime, ragtime music was a scandal. But that was what mainstream America wanted from black music: a taste of the forbidden. In 1900, the prominent music magazine The Etude denounced ragtime as a “virulent poison” and “malarious epidemic” damaging the “brains of the youth to such an extent as to arouse one’s suspicions of their sanity.” A host of other accusations were hurled at ragtime. Ragtime was just noise, claimed upholders of establishment values. Its very sound was monotonous and depressing. Its presence in respectable settings was a sacrilege. Trained musicians were losing jobs to untutored pretenders. And if you listened to ragtime long enough, you might even go insane. But the greatest fears aroused by musical upheavals of this sort are almost always sexual in nature. These concerns usually went unspoken, but a writer for the Musical Courier spelled them out for his readers: Ragtime, he declared, “is symbolic of the primitive morality and perceptible moral limitations of the negro type. With the latter, sexual restraint is almost unknown.”⁷

这些抱怨并没有损害拉格泰姆音乐的商业前景，甚至可能在某些圈子里促进了拉格泰姆音乐的发展。但这并没有给斯科特·乔普林带来多少安慰。普利策奖在维基百科上看起来不错，但乔普林希望在有生之年就获得合法地位——更重要的是，他渴望有机会创作比拉格泰姆市场更大规模的音乐。无论如何，他都极具前瞻性。他甚至成功谈妥了《枫叶拉格》的版权协议，从现存的合同中我们可以看到，他聘请了律师来维护自己的利益——这对于他那一代的黑人音乐家来说，实属难得。而就在这部作品取得成功后，乔普林立即开始酝酿更加雄心勃勃的计划。早在1899年，他就组建了一个剧团，表演带有歌唱旁白的拉格泰姆芭蕾舞剧，并租下了一家当地歌剧院来展示他的音乐才华。可惜，关于他这一愿景的唯一留存文献是斯塔克于 1902 年出版的《拉格泰姆舞曲》钢琴乐谱。乔普林的下一个项目，歌剧《贵宾》（1903 年），已完全失传。但从现存的新闻报道中可以看出他的雄心壮志。报道告诉我们，乔普林创作了音乐，写了歌词，雇佣并排练了演员，并以“斯科特·乔普林拉格泰姆歌剧公司”的名义巡回演出。即使是这个名字，在 1903 年前后的美国也令人惊叹。由于票房收入被盗，巡演被迫中断，但无论如何，很难想象乔普林凭借这种对高雅音乐自命不凡的反抗能走多远。

These complaints didn’t hurt the commercial prospects of ragtime music, and probably even gave them a boost in some circles. But this offered little consolation to Scott Joplin. That Pulitzer looks good on his Wikipedia page, but Joplin wanted legitimization during his lifetime—and even more, he craved the chance to write music on a larger scale than the market for ragtime allowed. He was forward-looking by any measure. He even managed to negotiate a royalty agreement for “Maple Leaf Rag,” and we can see from the surviving contract that he secured his own lawyer to defend his interests—an extraordinary move for a black musician of his generation. And immediately after the success of that work, Joplin started hatching even more ambitious plans. As early as 1899, he formed a troupe to perform a ragtime ballet with sung narration, and rented a local opera house to showcase his musical vision. Alas, the only surviving documentation of his vision is the piano sheet music for “The Ragtime Dance,” published by Stark in 1902. Joplin’s next project, the opera A Guest of Honor (1903), is entirely lost to us. But the scope of his ambition can be gauged by surviving news accounts. They tell us that Joplin composed music, wrote lyrics, hired and rehearsed a cast, and took his show on the road under the banner of “Scott Joplin’s Ragtime Opera Company.” Even that name is amazing in the context of America circa 1903. The tour collapsed when someone stole the box-office receipts, but it’s hard to imagine Joplin getting very far in any case with this defiant assault on highbrow music pretensions.

诚然，黑人戏剧正在走向主流。1903 年，由非裔美国人创作团队创作的《在达荷美：一部黑人音乐喜剧》在百老汇首次亮相并大获成功，该团队包括威尔·马里恩·库克、保罗·劳伦斯·邓巴和杰西·A·希普。这部作品标志着黑人音乐史上的重大突破，为其他作曲家后来的一系列舞台项目铺平了道路。但《在达荷美》与吟游诗人和杂耍剧的模式有着明显的联系，因此远不如乔普林试图将歌剧语言重塑为黑人自豪感和非裔美国人音乐表达的载体那样雄心勃勃。《贵宾》的故事围绕黑人教育家布克·T·华盛顿 1901 年访问白宫与西奥多·罗斯福总统共进晚餐展开——这一事件在那个时代受到媒体的广泛谴责种族隔离的普遍性。你很难想象有两部非裔美国人戏剧作品能比《在达荷美》和《贵宾》更加不同。这部不切实际的作品代表了乔普林对大多数由白人闯入者创作的黑人音乐中贬低基调的纠正——这是一场为20世纪初美国社会最进步的成员打造的反吟游表演。我毫不奇怪，这部剧的乐谱没有一份副本留存至今。

True, black theater was going mainstream at this very moment. The year 1903 saw the successful Broadway debut of In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy, written by an African American creative team consisting of Will Marion Cook, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Jesse A. Shipp. That production marked a major breakthrough in the history of black music, paving the way for a host of later stage projects by other composers. But In Dahomey, with its obvious linkages to minstrel and vaudeville formulas, was hardly as ambitious as Joplin’s attempt to reinvent the opera idiom as a vehicle for black pride and African American musical expression. The plot of A Guest of Honor revolves around black educator Booker T. Washington’s 1901 visit to the White House to dine with President Theodore Roosevelt—an event widely denounced in the press during that era of widespread segregation. You could hardly imagine two more different works of African American theater than In Dahomey and A Guest of Honor. This quixotic project represented Joplin’s corrective to the demeaning tone of most black music constructed by white interlopers—an anti-minstrel show for the most progressive members of American society at the dawn of the twentieth century. I am hardly surprised that no copy of the musical score has survived.

乔普林甚至愿意放弃拉格泰姆来提升自己作曲家的地位。他现存最大胆的作品是歌剧《树妖》，这部歌剧极少使用拉格泰姆乐句。乔普林的目标正是建立一个与瓦格纳传统相当的黑人版本，用非裔美国人的历史和民间传说取代日耳曼神话。在音乐史的这个阶段，关于女性的歌剧通常被期望关注她们的性和罪恶，但乔普林的《树妖》打破了这些期望。主角是一位骄傲的黑人女性，她在与迷信和无知作斗争的同时拥护教育。我们的作曲家真的相信美国已经准备好接受这一切吗？我们应该哀叹乔普林的天真，还是应该为他的专心致志喝彩？无论如何，最终结果是可以预见的。尽管乔普林为这个项目投入了多年，但他未能获得进行专业制作所需的支持。在他生命的最后阶段，他的其他宏伟计划也化为泡影——包括一部传闻已久（但几乎可以肯定已失传）的钢琴协奏曲和交响曲。1917年他去世时，人们即使记得他，也只能说他是一位低俗钢琴音乐风格的倡导者，这种音乐风格适合在酒吧和妓院里演奏。

Joplin was even willing to leave ragtime behind in order to improve his status as a composer. His boldest surviving project, the opera Treemonisha, only makes the most sparing use of rag phrasing. Instead, Joplin aimed at nothing less than establishing a black equivalent of the Wagnerian tradition, with African American history and folklore substituting for Teutonic mythology. At this stage in music history, operas about women were usually expected to focus on their sexuality and sinfulness, but Joplin’s Treemonisha defied these expectations. The title character is a proud black woman who champions education while battling superstition and ignorance. Did our composer really believe America was ready for this? Should we lament Joplin’s naïveté, or applaud his single-minded determination? In any event, the end result was all too predictable. Despite the years he devoted to this project, Joplin failed to find the backing necessary to mount a professional production. In his final days, his other grand plans also came to naught—including work on a rumored (but almost certainly lost) piano concerto and symphony. At his death in 1917, he was remembered, if at all, as the exponent of a lowbrow style of piano music suitable for honky-tonks and bordellos.

斯科特·乔普林在争取合法化的过程中所面临的几乎不可逾越的障碍应该清楚地表明，在快速发展的现代社会中，音乐创新的反对者们一如既往地古板且无情。当我们在音乐中寻求新鲜刺激时，我们不可避免地会转向那些违反禁忌的局外人及其危险的非法商品；我们不希望这种音乐合法化，至少在现阶段是这样，我们甚至会谴责任何音乐反叛者的行为是叛逆行为。尝试进入主流。当然，这一切都会随着时间而改变。我们最终会允许这些叛逆者进入卡内基音乐厅——顺便说一句，斯科特·乔普林的钢琴全集于2017年在那里首次演出，以纪念他逝世一百周年——但前提是经过一段充分的冷静期。到了那个后期阶段，我们就会转向新的颠覆性声音，并让旧的声音成为受人尊敬的经典。

The almost insurmountable obstacles Scott Joplin faced in his attempts at legitimization should make clear that the opponents of musical innovation have been just as stodgy and unforgiving in fast-moving modern times as they were in ancient and medieval societies. When we seek something new and exciting in music, we inevitably turn to those taboo-violating outsiders with their dangerous, illicit wares; we don’t want this music legitimized, not at this stage, and will even denounce as sell-outs any musical rebel’s attempt to enter the mainstream. Of course, this all changes with time. We will eventually allow these rebels into Carnegie Hall—where, by the way, the complete piano works of Scott Joplin were performed for the first time in 2017 to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of his death—but only after a sufficient cooling-off period has elapsed. By that late stage, we have moved on to new subversive sounds, and can let the old ones age into respectable classics.

22

22

反叛成为主流

Rebellion Goes Mainstream

当然，第一张爵士乐唱片发行于斯科特·乔普林1917年逝世前几天，这纯属巧合。同年，埃塞尔·沃特斯决定在自己的演唱中加入WC·汉迪的《圣路易斯布鲁斯》也同样如此——她或许是第一位演唱这首如今已成为标志性歌曲的黑人女性，但很快，许多人便纷纷效仿。真正促成美国音乐品味转变的或许是第一次世界大战，这是漫长的大规模暴力历史中又一个里程碑，它对歌曲产生了次级影响。即使美国抛弃孤立主义精神，介入地缘政治冲突，其音乐创作也变得更加内向。一场旨在清除美国音乐厅中的德国作曲家和表演者，用本土人才取而代之的运动，是对国家军事对手的一种冷落，也是这种转变最明显的体现。但美国音乐日益美国化的更显著迹象很快会在音乐厅和管弦乐队演出之外的其他地方显现出来。大众娱乐正在迅速变化在这个历史性关头，几乎没有对旧世界的榜样表示任何尊重。

Of course, it’s pure coincidence that the first jazz record was released just a few days before Scott Joplin’s death in 1917. The same is true of Ethel Waters’s decision, that same year, to include W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” in her performances—she may have been the first black woman to feature this now iconic song, but soon many others would follow her lead. The real instigator of this shift in America’s musical tastes might actually have been World War I, another milestone moment in the long history of mass violence exerting a second-order impact on songs. Even as America left behind its isolationist ethos to intrude into geopolitical conflicts, it became more inward-looking in its music. A movement to purge American concert halls of German composers and performers and replace them with homegrown talent, as a kind of snub to the nation’s military adversary, was the most visible manifestation of this shift. But even more momentous indicators of the growing Americanization of American music would soon be evident elsewhere, outside the realm of concert halls and orchestra programs. Popular entertainment was changing rapidly at this historic juncture, and with virtually no deference to Old World role models.

大规模战争总是会扰乱传统的习俗和熟悉的生活方式，尤其是在持续数年，并让成千上万——有时甚至是数百万——的士兵远离家乡，接触不同的文化的情况下。总有一天，一位精明的多学科学者会更深入地探究这些由血腥屠杀引发的音乐实践变革的历史。但即使粗略地一瞥，也能发现战争的暴力与西方文化中歌曲的崇高性之间持续存在的联系：荷马歌颂特洛伊战争的愤怒与残酷，十字军从旅途中带回“异域”乐器，法国大革命带来的复杂音乐后果，以及现代摇滚乐与越南战争及其他事件之间的密切联系。如果不是从战场归来的战士们改写了音乐史，那么承担起这一责任的便是难民、抗议者或其家人。无论如何，从当时被称为“一战”的美国士兵归来后，发现归途中等待着他们的是截然不同的歌曲。（而且这种影响是双向的：黑人士兵在欧洲音乐中留下了自己的印记，尤其是在一位名叫詹姆斯·里斯·欧佩罗（James Reese Europe）的非裔美国乐队领队的影响下。他组建的“哈莱姆地狱战士”乐团，由一支以战斗力和爵士乐演奏家闻名的军队组成，在法国广泛演出，改变了欧洲大陆的文化，直到1919年返回美国。）

Major wars always disrupt traditional customs and familiar patterns of living, especially when they transpire over a period of years and involve exposing thousands—or in some cases, millions—of soldiers to different cultures far away from home. Someday a shrewd multidisciplinary scholar will probe more deeply into the history of these bloodshed-driven modifications in musical practices. But even a cursory glance brings out the ongoing linkage between the violence of war and the sublimity of song in Western culture, starting with Homer singing about the rage and brutality of the Trojan War, recurring when the Crusaders brought back ‘exotic’ instruments from their travels, and then again with the complex musical after-effects of the French Revolution, and in modern times with the intimate connections between rock music and the Vietnam War and beyond. If it isn’t the combatants returning from the battlefield to rewrite music history, it’s the refugees, protesters, or family members taking on that responsibility. In any event, the American soldiers coming back from the Great War, as it was known back then, discovered completely different songs awaiting them on their homecoming. (And the influence went both ways: black soldiers left their mark on European music, especially through the intervention of the aptly named James Reese Europe, an African American bandleader whose ensemble of “Harlem Hellfighters,” drawn from a military unit known both for its fighting prowess and jazz-oriented instrumentalists, performed widely in France, changing continental culture before returning home to the United States in 1919.)

在此期间，音乐传播的方式也在发生变化。最显著的变化来自于唱片日益增长的影响力——我们稍后会对此进行更深入的探讨——但即使是现场演出场所也在改变音乐的传播和消费方式。如今，吟游表演远不如歌舞杂耍（vaudeville）受欢迎，后者是一种戏剧形式，巡回演出种类繁多，每次演出规模从10到20场不等。几分钟的时间来展示他们的才华。这真是一个奇特的组合：杂耍剧院可能呈现魔术师、音乐家、腹语表演者、杂技演员、喜剧演员、宠物魔术师、杂耍演员、舞蹈演员以及各种特技、模仿秀和其他表演的从业者。几乎在美国每一个重要的人口中心，观众都可以坐下来，在几个小时的时间里看到各种各样的美国才艺，从粗俗到高雅，都在他们眼前展现。独立的杂耍剧院服务于大城市的黑人观众，提升了许多非裔美国艺人的职业生涯，而在几十年前，他们没有任何巡演的平台。与历史上任何时候相比，不同社区的观众都在听相同的歌曲，甚至相同的表演者。这种以明星为主导的娱乐业正在创造一个大众市场，反之亦然。

The ways music went viral were also shifting during this period. The most powerful change came with the growing influence of the phonograph record—and we will talk more about that soon—but even live performance venues were altering how music was disseminated and consumed. The minstrel show now proved far less popular than vaudeville, a format of theatrical production featuring an endless variety of touring acts, each given from ten to twenty minutes to display their talents. And what an odd assortment of talents: vaudeville theater might present magicians, musicians, ventriloquists, acrobats, comedians, pet tricks, jugglers, dancers, and practitioners of various stunts, impersonations, and other routines. In virtually every significant population center in the United States, audiences could sit down and over the course of a few hours see the full range of American talent, from crude to highbrow, paraded before their eyes. Separate vaudeville theaters served black audiences in major cities, elevating the careers of many African American entertainers who, in earlier decades, would have lacked any platform for touring. More than at any previous point in history, audiences in different communities were listening to the same songs, and even the same performers. This star-driven entertainment business was creating a mass market, and vice versa.

然而，就在杂耍剧逐渐发展成为横跨美国东西海岸的大众娱乐网络之际，歌曲的下一场革命——或许是现代史上最伟大的革命——却几乎完全脱离了音乐产业而起步。随着时间的推移，杂耍剧团经理、唱片公司和广播电台发现了布鲁斯音乐，并加速了其在更广泛文化中的传播。但这种大胆越界的音乐风格最早的出现，却并未引起美国娱乐圈权力掮客的关注。事实上，如果你绘制一张20世纪初重要布鲁斯音乐家出生地的散点图，结果会令人惊讶地显示出，它们都避开了企业文化的主要中心。这种音乐在其最初的繁荣时期，似乎与黑人贫困，尤其是黑人农村的贫困息息相关。

Yet at the very moment when vaudeville was evolving into a coast-to-coast network for mass entertainment, the next revolution in song—perhaps the greatest in modern times—was getting its start in almost complete isolation from the music business. In time, vaudeville impresarios, record labels, and radio stations would discover the blues, and would accelerate its dissemination into the broader culture. But the earliest manifestations of this brazenly transgressive idiom first appeared outside the notice of the power brokers in American entertainment. In fact, if you drew a scatterplot of the birthplaces of important blues musicians from the early twentieth century, the resulting pattern would show a surprising avoidance of the major centers of corporate culture. This music, in its first blossoming, seems correlated with black poverty, and especially black rural poverty.

布鲁斯音乐的兴起或许能为我们提供一个最有力的检验案例，来检验本书的一个关键论点，即音乐创新源自底层阶级的论断。如果这一假设能够得到证实，它将展现音乐与其他艺术形式的显著差异。例如，绘画和雕塑的创新几乎总是在富裕的赞助人身边发生——即使在今天，几百名富裕的收藏家也为视觉艺术经济奠定了基调。小说的兴起吸引了工业革命时期创造财富的企业带来的动力。如今的新兴艺术媒介——电子游戏、虚拟现实，以及未来可能出现的一切——似乎都与硅谷的盈利企业密不可分。唯有音乐遵循着不同的规则，而且几乎是毫不妥协的。

The rise of the blues may offer the most powerful test case we could devise for assessing a key thesis of this book, namely, the assertion that musical innovation comes from the underclass. This hypothesis, if it could be proven, would show how different music is from other art forms. Innovation in painting and sculpture, for example, has almost always happened in close proximity to rich patrons—even today, a couple hundred affluent collectors set the tone for the visual arts economy. The rise of the novel drew momentum from the wealth-creating enterprises of the Industrial Revolution. The new artistic mediums of today—video games, virtual reality, and probably whatever is coming next—appear inextricably connected to profit-generating businesses in Silicon Valley. Only music plays by different rules, almost defiantly so.

让我们扪心自问：在20世纪初的几十年里，美国哪个地方最孤立、最贫困、最没有条件发起一场文化革命？答案一定是密西西比州。它普遍贫困，人均收入在各州中最低。随着新技术的涌入，密西西比州却最晚享受到这些好处。在密西西比三角洲布鲁斯音乐的辉煌时期，密西西比州的汽车、电话和收音机普及率却是全美最低的。甚至连电力在密西西比州都供不应求：直到1937年，当密西西比布鲁斯传奇人物罗伯特·约翰逊录制他最后的唱片时，该州只有1%的农场能够用上电。

Let’s ask ourselves this question: Which locale in the United States was the most isolated and impoverished and least well equipped to launch a cultural revolution in the early decades of the twentieth century? The answer would have to be the state of Mississippi. It suffered from widespread poverty and enjoyed the lowest per capita income of any state. As new technologies came on the market, Mississippi was the last to enjoy their benefits. During the glory days of the Mississippi Delta blues, it had the lowest penetration of automobiles, telephones, and radios of all the states. Even electricity was in short supply in Mississippi: as late as 1937, when Mississippi blues legend Robert Johnson made his final recordings, only 1 percent of the farms in that state had access to it.

我们应该停下来思考，从二十世纪初到（土生土长的）猫王埃尔维斯·普雷斯利和摇滚乐兴起的整整半个世纪里，这些压抑的环境是如何一次又一次地催生出美国音乐界最具变革性的激进分子的。这个“落后”的中心也孕育了马迪·沃特斯、嚎叫之狼、萨姆·库克、查理·帕顿、桑·豪斯、BB·金、阿尔伯特·金、约翰·李·胡克、斯基普·詹姆斯、埃尔莫尔·詹姆斯、布卡·怀特、波·迪德利以及其他众多引领歌曲革命的人物。总的来说，这些创新者不仅确立了密西西比布鲁斯的重要性，也为芝加哥布鲁斯、R&B、摇滚乐和其他主流音乐风格的兴起提供了关键要素。

We should stop and ponder how these oppressive circumstances spawned the most transformative radicals in American music, again and again, during the whole half-century period from the dawn of the twentieth century to the rise of (Mississippi born and bred) Elvis Presley and rock ’n’ roll. This center of ‘backwardness’ also spawned Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sam Cooke, Charley Patton, Son House, B. B. King, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, Skip James, Elmore James, Bukka White, Bo Diddley, and a host of others, who set in motion repeated revolutions in song. In aggregate, these innovators would not only establish the significance of Mississippi blues, but also provide the key ingredients that led to the rise of Chicago blues, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, and other mainstream styles.

当然，密西西比州在这方面也提供了一些帮助。你无法确凿地证明布鲁斯音乐是在密西西比州发明的——事实上，我不确定“发明”这个词是否与这种似乎带有如此强烈古老血统痕迹的音乐风格相关，这种血统可以追溯到非洲。但从德克萨斯州到阿巴拉契亚山脉的其他早期布鲁斯中心，也展现出类似的贫困和孤立人口结构。事实上，这种音乐的早期历史正因为如此，布鲁斯音乐才如此难以追溯。布鲁斯音乐的最初萌芽发生在没有录音设备、识字率相对较低的地区。偶尔会有研究人员来到现场，记录下这种新颖的音乐——比如哈佛大学学者查尔斯·皮博迪，他在 1901 年密西西比三角洲的一次考古挖掘中被听到的黑人音乐迷住了，社会学家霍华德·奥德姆则在 1905 年至 1908 年间收集了该地区的歌曲。在很多情况下，早期的研究人员甚至没有用“布鲁斯”这个词来描述他们所听到的音乐。这本身就表明这种音乐在当时有多么脱离主流。你能想象一种甚至没有名字的音乐流派吗？你必须与商业市场和娱乐业的模式隔绝到何种程度，才能保持如此纯粹的风格？

Of course, Mississippi had some help in this regard. You can’t prove with any certainty that blues music was invented in Mississippi—in fact, I’m not sure the term invented is at all relevant to a style that seems to bear such strong signs of an ancient lineage going back to Africa. But the other centers of early blues, from Texas to Appalachia, reveal similar demographic patterns of poverty and isolation. In fact, the early history of this music is so hard to trace because of this very fact. The first stirrings of the blues took place in areas with no recording devices and comparatively low rates of literacy. Occasionally a researcher would show up on the scene and note the innovative music at hand—as did Charles Peabody, a Harvard scholar, who was mesmerized by the black music he heard during an archaeological dig in the Mississippi Delta in 1901, or Howard Odum, a sociologist, who collected songs in the region between 1905 and 1908. In many instances, early researchers did not even use the word “blues” to describe what they heard. That in itself is a measure of how outside the mainstream this music was at the time. Can you imagine a music genre that doesn’t even have a name? How isolated must you be from commercial markets and the formulas of the entertainment industry to exist in that degree of purity?

霍华德·奥德姆和他的同事盖伊·约翰逊更倾向于将这些旋律描述为“平凡的悲伤歌曲”，他们在1926年写道，这些歌曲“几十年前在密西西比州的营地和路上”录制完成，当时现代布鲁斯音乐的技巧还未发展成熟。皮博迪则没有试图将他听到的歌曲归入某个标签或流派类别，而是列举了最终被正式定型为布鲁斯音乐的所有关键元素。他描述了音符的推弦，并指出这是有意为之，而非演唱水平低下造成的。他指出了歌曲对三个和弦的依赖。他注意到歌曲对厄运、爱情和暴力主题的执着。或许是对未来最令人毛骨悚然的展望，皮博迪讲述了他从一位“受雇于密西西比州斯托瓦尔市约翰·斯托瓦尔先生种植园的年迈黑人”那里听到的一场格外令人难忘的表演的细节。但他难以用语言表达其精髓。在尝试并放弃了各种比较之后——音乐很奇怪，日本风格，单调，像风笛或口琴，诸如此类——他给我们留下了一个简单的总结：“我再也没有听到过这种音乐，也没有听说过它。”想想看，在皮博迪造访四十年后，国会图书馆特使艾伦·洛马克斯发现芝加哥布鲁斯和原始摇滚乐的先驱马迪·沃特斯住在同一个斯托瓦尔种植园，然后试想一下，在本世纪初为皮博迪演奏布鲁斯音乐的“老黑人”的年龄和音乐教育背景。很难不得出这样的结论：这种音乐的根源可以追溯到音乐产业决定给它贴上标签并通过营销活动支持它的时代^。1

Howard Odum and his colleague Guy Johnson preferred to describe these melodies as “workaday sorrow songs,” writing in 1926 that they had been documented “decades ago from camp and road in Mississippi before the technique of the modern blues had ever been evolved.” Peabody, for his part, made no attempt to define the songs he heard under a label or genre category, but mentioned all the key ingredients that would eventually become codified as blues music. He described the bending of notes, and pointed out that it was intentional and not the result of poor singing ability. He identified the reliance on three chords. He noted the fixation on themes of hard luck, love, and violence. In perhaps the most eerie anticipation of the future, Peabody recounted the details of an especially haunting performance he heard from a “very old negro employed on the plantation of Mr. John Stovall of Stovall, Mississippi.” But he struggled to convey its essence in words. After trying and abandoning various comparisons—the music was weird, Japanese, monotonous, resembled a bagpipe or a Jew’s harp, and the like—he left us with this simple summation: “I have not heard that kind again nor of it.” Consider the fact that Muddy Waters, the pioneer of Chicago blues and proto–rock ’n’ roll, was discovered residing on that same Stovall Plantation by a Library of Congress emissary, Alan Lomax, forty years after Peabody’s visit, and then try to guess the age and musical education of the “very old negro” who performed the blues for Peabody at the dawn of the century. It’s hard not to conclude that the roots of this music date back to a time long before the music industry decided to give it a label and support it with a marketing campaign.¹

事实上，很难想象布鲁斯音乐是如何得到二十世纪上半叶美国音乐界的支持的。对于这种“淫秽音乐”的传播者来说，Muddy Waters 这个名字再合适不过了。这就是广告中的真相。布鲁斯歌词中对性和暴力的露骨提及远远超出了主流音乐界此前允许的范围。只有早期唱片的目标市场是非裔美国人市场——并被贴上种族唱片的商业标签，而此前的淫秽概念显然已不再适用于这一类别——才能解释为什么表演者可以肆意制造震惊和恐慌。在某些情况下，性暗示隐藏在粗俗的象征意义之后。但是，真的有听众不知道布鲁斯音乐家 Bo Carter 在他的歌曲“Please Warm My Weiner”或“Banana in Your Fruit Basket”中唱的是什么吗？Bessie Smith 用“Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl”骗过了任何人吗？

In fact, it’s hard to imagine how the blues ever got the backing of the American music industry during the first half of the twentieth century. Muddy Waters is an appropriate name for a purveyor of such dirty music. That’s truth-in-advertising for you. The explicit references to sex and violence in blues lyrics went far beyond anything the mainstream music business had previously permitted. Only the fact that the early recordings were targeted at the African American market—and assigned the commercial label of race records, a category within which previous notions of obscenity apparently no longer applied—explains the leeway given performers to shock and alarm. In some instances, the sexual references were hidden behind crude symbolism. But was there really any listener who didn’t know what blues musician Bo Carter was singing about in his songs “Please Warm My Weiner” or “Banana in Your Fruit Basket”? Did Bessie Smith fool anyone with “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl”?

唱片公司也参与了这场闹剧。盲人莱蒙·杰斐逊（Blind Lemon Jefferson）发行《黑蛇呻吟》（That Black Snake Moan）时，派拉蒙（Paramount）用“黑蛇——怪异、黏糊糊、令人毛骨悚然”的广告词进行宣传（根据营销文案）。但乐迷们被告知：“当你听到那呻吟声时，你就再也听不下去了。” 对于后续作品《黑蛇呻吟2号》（Black Snake Moan No. 2），派拉蒙认为这种暗示还不够明显，于是又添加了一幅插图，画中一位性欲亢奋的熟睡者躺在床上，面对着一条从他两腿之间钻出的巨大黑蛇，蛇头明显竖立着。有时，即使是这种轻微的伪装也会被抛到一边，比如简·卢卡斯（Jane Lucas）在1930年的一张唱片中宣称：“你可以玩弄我的阴部，但不要缠着它；如果你要虐待它，我就不会找到你的阴部。” 然而，现场表演中的布鲁斯音乐则更加露骨。 “周六晚上的舞会上，什么歌都可以唱，”布鲁斯偶像桑·豪斯宣称。“我不在乎你唱得多下流；他们喜欢听。” ²

The record labels went along with the charade. When Blind Lemon Jefferson released his “That Black Snake Moan,” Paramount promoted it with an ad campaign featuring “black snakes—weird, slimy, creepy” (according to the marketing copy). But music fans were advised: “You’ll never stop playing this one when you hear that moan.” For the follow-up, “Black Snake Moan No. 2,” Paramount decided that the innuendo hadn’t been clear enough, and now featured an illustration of an aroused sleeper, still in bed, confronting a huge black snake rising from between his legs, whose head is in a markedly erect posture. Sometimes even this slight degree of pretense was thrown aside, as when Jane Lucas declared on a 1930 recording: “You can play with my pussy, but don’t dog it around; if you’re going to mistreat it, no pussy will be found.” Yet blues in live performance was even more explicit. “You could sing anything at them Saturday night balls,” declared blues icon Son House. “I don’t care how dirty you made it; they liked to hear it.”²

早期布鲁斯歌词中对暴力的描述同样极端。关于枪支的歌曲出奇地普遍，这些歌曲采用了颂歌的风格，这种风格从古代吟游诗人和品达一直延伸到当代嘻哈歌手对古驰和耐克配饰的赞美。罗伯特·约翰逊夸耀他的.32-20温彻斯特手枪比情人的.38特制手枪更胜一筹，并承诺它可以把他的坏女人砍成两半。约翰逊显然受到了斯基普·詹姆斯的启发，后者也曾对他的.22-20手枪做出过类似的夸赞，他计划每当他的情妇不听话时就用这把枪。在这些歌曲中，女性往往是受害者，但有些人玩这个把戏甚至比男性更厉害。玛·雷尼吹嘘她精通加特林机枪——这是当今自动武器的致命前身，显然比约翰逊或詹姆斯在战斗中使用的任何武器都要好。而这些不仅仅是威胁。在她的歌曲《心碎蓝调》（Broken Hearted Blues）中，雷尼在法庭上承认了自己犯下的集体谋杀罪——不仅杀害了她那不成器的爱人，还杀害了周围的所有人。这些歌曲中，枪支传说（既有真实的，也有虚构的）的数量惊人，但布鲁斯歌手的歌谣远不止于此。根据歌词，玛丽·巴特勒怀里藏着一把剃刀，计划先割断她的男人，再用手枪结束他的生命。乔治亚·汤姆（福音音乐先驱托马斯·多尔西的布鲁斯名字）则更倾向于用屠刀砍下他女人的头。维多利亚·斯皮维则选择在爱人的饮料里下毒。此外，还有一大批布鲁斯歌曲都与喝汽油有关。

Descriptions of violence in early blues lyrics were just as extreme. Songs about guns were surprisingly common, and these adopted the style of praise odes, a lineage that stretches from ancient bards and Pindar all the way to contemporary hip-hoppers extolling their Gucci and Nike accessories. Robert Johnson praised the superiority of his .32-20 Winchester over his lover’s .38 special, and promised it would cut his no-good woman in half. Johnson was obviously inspired by Skip James, who had made a similar claim for his .22-20, which he planned to use whenever his gal got unruly. Women were often victims in these songs, but some could play this game even better than the men. Ma Rainey bragged about her expertise with a Gatling gun, a deadly forerunner of today’s automatic weapons, and clearly superior to anything Johnson or James would bring to a fight. And these were more than just threats. In her song “Broken Hearted Blues,” Rainey confesses in court to a mass murder—not just her no-good lover, but everyone else in the vicinity was taken down in her killing spree. The amount of gun lore, both true and imagined, in these songs is striking, but blues singers didn’t just sing about firearms. Mary Butler, according to her lyrics, kept a razor in her bosom, and planned to cut up her man before finishing him off with a pistol. Georgia Tom (the blues name of gospel music pioneer Thomas Dorsey) preferred to cut his woman’s head off with a butcher knife. Victoria Spivey opted for a dose of poison in her lover’s drink. And there’s a whole subgenre of blues songs about drinking gasoline.

这些曲调或许对公众道德构成了威胁，但即使是布鲁斯音乐的构成要素，哪怕是音符本身，也令人愤慨。原因很简单，它们拒绝成为音符。在毕达哥拉斯范式延续两千多年之后，布鲁斯宣称音乐不再需要屈从于数学。事实上，面对所有为编纂和系统化西方音乐所做的努力，布鲁斯音乐学堪称一桩丑闻。它的旋律拒绝融入公认的音乐符号体系——自圭多·阿雷佐时代以来就被公认为作曲的框架。布鲁斯音乐的音高，其最基本的构成要素，同样抵制了所有传统的合调演奏观念——甚至早在 1903 年，皮博迪就曾告诉他的读者，密西西比的音乐家并不是不知道如何合调唱歌，只是拒绝这样做——并将歌曲以不受约束的声音回归到其本源。

These tunes may well have posed a threat to public morals, yet even the musical ingredients, the very notes of the blues, were an outrage. And for the simple reason that they refused to be notes. After more than two thousand years of the Pythagorean paradigm, blues declared that music no longer needed to remain subservient to mathematics. Indeed, the musicology of the blues was a scandal in the face of everything that had been done to codify and schematize Western music. Its melodies refused to fit into the accepted system of music notation, the acknowledged framework for composition since the time of Guido of Arezzo. The musical pitches of the blues, its most basic building blocks, similarly resisted all conventional notions of playing in tune—even back in 1903, Peabody had advised his readers that Mississippi musicians weren’t ignorant of how to sing in tune, but simply refused to do so—and returned song to its origins in unconstrained sound.

我们还需要注意到一个有趣的事实，即在布鲁斯音乐出现的同时，古典音乐界也在反抗毕达哥拉斯的束缚，重新评估几个世纪以来盛行的调音音符和噪音之间的界限——并且这样做的方式反映出对非裔美国艺术家在这一项目中所扮演角色的清晰把握。1917 年芭蕾舞剧《游行》的音乐由埃里克·萨蒂创作，让·科克托负责剧本（和音效），巴勃罗·毕加索负责服装和布景，其中的发声工具包括打字机、雾角、手枪和叮当作响的牛奶瓶，还有让人想起拉格泰姆的音乐片段。非洲元素在乔治·安塞尔的《机械芭蕾》中更加明显，用警笛和螺旋桨表演。安塞尔解释说，这部作品的目的是“表达美国、非洲和钢铁”。这位作曲家当然了解布鲁斯——安塞尔甚至聘请了WC·汉迪的乐团来演奏他的爵士交响曲——并经常在黑人文化的背景下描述他的创作。在现代音乐的这个关键时刻，即使是欧洲古典音乐界最进步的人士，也将将非定音音符引入“噪音”领域的努力视为一项由非裔美国演奏者主导的计划^。3

We also need to take note of the curious fact that the classical music world was rebelling against Pythagorean constraints at the very same moment that the blues emerged, reassessing the boundaries between tuned notes and noise that had prevailed for centuries—and doing so in ways that reflected a clear grasp of the role African American artists were playing in this project. Music for the 1917 ballet Parade, composed by Erik Satie, with a scenario (and input on sound effects) from Jean Cocteau, as well as costumes and sets by Pablo Picasso, featured noise-making implements that included a typewriter, foghorn, pistol, and clanking milk bottles alongside musical bits and pieces evocative of ragtime. The African element was even more explicit in George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, performed with siren and propellers. Antheil explained that the work was designed to “express America, Africa and Steel.” This composer was certainly aware of the blues—Antheil even hired W. C. Handy’s orchestra to perform his Jazz Symphony—and frequently described his endeavors in the context of black culture. At this critical juncture in modern music, even the most progressive members of the European classical music world saw the enterprise of moving outside tuned notes into the realm of ‘noise’ as a project led by African American performers.³

同样的打破常规也延伸到了音乐形式的更大结构上。尽管人们通常教授十二小节布鲁斯，但早期的实践者并不遵循十二小节的模式。在很多情况下，他们不遵循任何既定的模式：有时布鲁斯的副歌可能持续十一小节或十三小节，甚至包含不完整的小节，即不遵循任何固定节奏的零散节拍。更离谱的是，同一首歌，如果由同一位表演者重复演奏，下次可能会出现不同的变化。定义布鲁斯风格的那些和声，那些布鲁斯歌曲中众所周知的三个和弦，同样难以被规范化。它们看起来一点也不像教科书上的配音，布鲁斯音乐在当今的呈现方式。它们的声音结构桀骜不驯，通常与I、IV、V和弦略有相似之处。随着时间的推移，这一切都发生了变化——西方音乐最终迫使布鲁斯音乐标准化。但这与其说是布鲁斯本身，不如说是试图遏制所有音乐创新的无情主流力量。在其早期表现形式中，布鲁斯歌曲无异于对西方音乐核心和灵魂的侮辱。

The same rule-breaking extended to the larger structures of musical form. Despite what is usually taught about the twelve-bar blues, the early practitioners didn’t follow a twelve-bar pattern. In many instances, they didn’t follow any set pattern: sometimes a blues chorus might last eleven bars or thirteen, or even include partial bars, stray beats that didn’t adhere to any organized metric. Even more outrageous, the same song, when repeated by the same performer, might make different deviations the next time around. The very blues harmonies that defined the idiom, those proverbial three chords of the blues song, were equally resistant to codification. They didn’t look anything like their textbook voicings as presented in the current day. They were unruly textures of sound that often bore only a loose resemblance to I, IV, and V chords. This would all change over time—Western music eventually forced blues into a standardized form. But that tells you less about the blues and more about the relentless mainstreaming forces that try to rein in all musical innovations. In their earliest manifestations, blues songs were nothing less than an affront to the very heart and soul of Western music.

正因如此，我不得不嘲笑那些试图抹黑布鲁斯历史的反复尝试。近年来，修正主义者孜孜不倦地为这种音乐构建新的谱系，竭力将其起源追溯到歌舞杂耍，或构想一个奇幻的平行宇宙，在那里，布鲁斯先驱们通过听唱片和广播学习演奏。布鲁斯起源于美国最偏远、最贫困的社区，这足以说明这种音乐对唱片业惯例的依赖有多么微不足道。

That’s why I have to laugh at the recurring attempts to clean up the history of the blues. In recent years, revisionists have worked tirelessly to construct alternative lineages for this music, struggling to trace its origins to vaudeville shows, or imagining a fanciful alternative universe in which blues pioneers learned how to play by listening to records and the radio. The very origins of the blues in the most isolated and impoverished communities in America should make clear how little this music relied on record-industry conventions.

然而，从某种程度上来说，这些试图净化布鲁斯音乐的奇特尝试是不可避免的，因为颠覆性的音乐风格总是如此——无论是歌曲本身还是其历史。就布鲁斯音乐而言，经过净化的歌曲率先在美国主流社会获得了广泛的关注。W.C.汉迪在密西西比州的一个火车站听到一位不知名的布鲁斯歌手用刀弹吉他，这一刻的灵感最终催生了《圣路易斯布鲁斯》。汉迪的这首歌剔除了布鲁斯音乐中大部分不规则的部分，使其更适合大众消费，成为20世纪最热门的歌曲之一，但它在塔特威勒火车站的原始雏形却从未有机会走红。20世纪20年代伟大的经典布鲁斯歌手——贝西·史密斯、玛·雷尼、玛米·史密斯等——借助了一大批助手，将布鲁斯音乐变成了一项商业资产。他们与专业的词曲作者、技艺精湛的伴奏者、服装和布景设计师、唱片制作人、演出经理以及其他人员合作，打造出一种布鲁斯音乐，其演奏规则和模式在密西西比三角洲或德克萨斯州乡村地区并不常见。这些表演者非常出色他们本身就是艺术家，也是创新者，但他们的作品必须放在布鲁斯音乐在其历史上的这个阶段已经融入的巨大文化适应力量的背景下看待。商业企业或许不是布鲁斯音乐的发明者，但他们肯定知道如何包装它。

Yet, in a way, these peculiar attempts to clean up the blues are inevitable, because that’s what always happens with subversive styles of music—both with the songs and their history. And in the case of the blues, the purified songs were the first to gain widespread visibility in mainstream America. W. C. Handy heard an unknown blues singer playing the guitar with a knife at a train station in Mississippi, and this moment of inspiration eventually led to the “St. Louis Blues.” That Handy song, which squeezed out most of the irregularities of the blues and made it suitable for mass consumption, became one of the biggest hits of the twentieth century, but its raw antecedent at the Tutwiler train station never got the chance to go viral. The great classic blues singers of the 1920s—Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, and others—drew on a whole posse of helpers to turn blues into a commercial property. They worked with professional songwriters, highly skilled accompanists, costume and set designers, record producers, impresarios, and others in crafting a blues sound that played by rules and formulas unknown in the Mississippi Delta or rural Texas. These performers were great artists in their own right, and innovators as well, but their work has to be viewed in light of the tremendous forces of acculturation already incorporated into the blues by this stage in its history. Commercial businesses may not have invented the blues, but they certainly knew how to package it.

在本书的引言中，我列出了那些令主流音乐界最为尴尬的歌曲元素，因此它们总是被“净化”起来。这份清单包括露骨的性暗示、对暴力的颂扬、对精神状态改变的暗示（无论是由麻醉品还是萨满式幻象引起）、魔法和迷信，以及其他一些不雅内容。布鲁斯音乐构成了特殊的威胁，因为它包含了所有这些元素。迷信元素对现代评论家来说尤其痛苦，他们竭尽全力想要去除它们，或者——当它们根深蒂固地嵌入歌曲中而无法去除时——寻找其他解释。这并非易事，因为这些元素几乎在布鲁斯音乐传统中随处可见。事实上，布鲁斯音乐历史上最著名的故事讲述的是罗伯特·约翰逊在午夜十字路口的一次会面中将自己的灵魂出卖给了魔鬼，以换取他传奇般的吉他技艺。其他一些不太知名的布鲁斯音乐家，比如汤米·约翰逊和皮蒂·惠特斯特劳（绰号“魔鬼女婿”），也都有类似的故事。过去二十年，布鲁斯音乐界掀起了一场去神话化运动，尤其是围绕罗伯特·约翰逊的传说。这些关于魔鬼的故事对于那些参与到布鲁斯音乐主流化和合法化进程的人来说尤其令人尴尬^。4

In the introduction to this book, I listed the ingredients of songs that are most embarrassing to the dominant musical establishment, and thus are always the target of ‘sanitation’ efforts. This list includes explicit sexual references, celebrations of violence, allusions to altered mind states (whether produced by intoxicants or shamanistic-type visions), magic and superstition, and other indecorous matters. The blues posed a particular threat because it embodied all of these things. The elements of superstition have been especially painful for modern commentators, who have worked assiduously to remove them, or—when removal is impossible, because they are too deeply embedded into the songs—to find alternative explanations. That’s a tall order, because these elements show up almost everywhere in the blues tradition. In fact, the most famous story in the entire history of the blues tells of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil during a midnight meeting at a crossroads in exchange for his legendary mastery of the guitar. Similar stories are recounted of other, lesser-known blues musicians, such as Tommy Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw (whose nickname was the “Devil’s Son-in-Law”). The past two decades have witnessed a movement to demythologize the blues, especially the legends surrounding Robert Johnson, and these stories about the devil are especially embarrassing to those involved in this process of mainstreaming and legitimization.⁴

一种普遍的反应是将这种尴尬归咎于布鲁斯乐迷。修正主义者巴里·李·皮尔森和比尔·麦卡洛克认为，布鲁斯乐迷皮特·韦尔丁在1966年发表的一篇文章“正式提出了这样一种观点：约翰逊是传说中的浮士德在20世纪的化身，据说浮士德是一位16世纪的占星家，为了获得知识和魔力，他将自己的灵魂出卖给了魔鬼，并因此招致了上帝的愤怒。” 根据这一假设，整整一代愚蠢的乐迷都相信了这种“有点可疑”的观点，但却被加以夸大，变成了蓝调神话中的一个主要内容^。5

A popular response is to blame blues fans for this embarrassment. According to revisionists Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch, a 1966 article by a blues enthusiast, Pete Welding, “formally launched the notion that Johnson was a twentieth-century incarnation of the legendary Faust, a sixteenth-century astrologer who supposedly sold his soul to the devil to gain knowledge and magical power and who thus incurred God’s anger.” Under this hypothesis, a whole generation of foolish fans bought into this notion, which was “more than a little dubious,” but got embellished and turned into a staple of blues mythology.⁵

这个说法可能是真的吗？罗伯特·约翰逊将灵魂出卖给魔鬼的故事真的直到20世纪60年代才出现，在他去世很久之后吗？这种粉饰太平的理论在仔细推敲后就不攻自破了。已故布鲁斯音乐学者麦克·麦考密克告诉我，他早在20世纪40年代就亲耳听过约翰逊出卖灵魂的故事，并在唱片收藏家和他进行实地考察的黑人社区中都发现了类似的传闻。我在国会图书馆发现了一份此前未发表的采访记录，其中记录了罗伯特·约翰逊的朋友兼同事大卫·“蜜宝”·爱德华兹在20世纪40年代初的采访。在采访中，他告诉采访者艾伦·洛马克斯，约翰逊因为参与了“魔鬼的生意”而失去了灵魂。但即使是1966年文章中的这一说法也并非皮特·韦尔丁的杜撰，而是直接引用了罗伯特·约翰逊现实生活中的导师桑·豪斯的话。当然，约翰逊的音乐本身就明确地提到了魔鬼和地狱——这些元素在《Hellhound on My Trail》或《Me and the Devil Blues》等歌曲中都显而易见。即使撇开这些暗示不谈，我们对约翰逊生平的了解也足以说明，他认为自己对音乐和生活方式的选择会将自己的灵魂置于危险之中，这种可能性甚至很大。至少，他知道，被魔鬼缠身的音乐家形象可以成为一个绝佳的营销故事（就像几十年后许多金属乐队发现的那样）^。6

Could this account be true? Did the story of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil really emerge only in the 1960s, long after his death? This sanitizing theory collapses when put under the microscope. The late blues scholar Mack McCormick told me that he personally had heard stories of Johnson selling his soul back in the 1940s, and had found them both among record collectors and in the black communities where he conducted field research. In the Library of Congress, I discovered a previously unpublished transcript of an interview with Robert Johnson’s friend and associate David “Honeyboy” Edwards that dates back to the early 1940s. Here he tells interviewer Alan Lomax that Johnson had lost his soul because he was involved in the “Devil’s business.” But even the reference in the 1966 article isn’t Pete Welding’s invention, but a direct quote from Son House, Robert Johnson’s real-life mentor. Of course, Johnson’s music itself explicitly references the devil and hell—these ingredients can’t be missed in songs such as “Hellhound on My Trail” or “Me and the Devil Blues.” Even apart from these allusions, what we know of Johnson’s life makes it plausible, perhaps even likely, that he believed his choice of music and lifestyle put his soul at risk. At a minimum, he knew that the image of devil-haunted musician made for a good marketing story (just as many metal bands discovered a few decades later).⁶

对于研究二十世纪早期南方黑人文化及其影响的非洲信仰体系的人来说，这一切都不足为奇。在罗伯特·约翰逊演奏布鲁斯音乐的同一时期，圣公会牧师兼民俗学家哈里·米德尔顿·海厄特对阿拉巴马州、阿肯色州、佛罗里达州、佐治亚州、伊利诺伊州、路易斯安那州、马里兰州、密西西比州、北卡罗来纳州、南卡罗来纳州、田纳西州和弗吉尼亚州等地关于魔法咒语、民间医学、巫术和魔术的流行观念进行了广泛的研究。他采访了1600名南方人，整理出了13458个咒语和迷信——全部发表在一部长达4766页的五卷本研究中。在这里，我们找到了……的真正根源催生罗伯特·约翰逊传奇的文化和信仰体系，与20世纪60年代乐迷的想法无关，而是直接源于布鲁斯音乐家开始录制唱片时密西西比三角洲盛行的态度和形而上学体系。试图将这些信仰体系从布鲁斯音乐家的人生故事中抹去，这种误导性尝试无异于改写历史。纯粹的布鲁斯音乐就是伪造的布鲁斯音乐^。7

None of this should be surprising to a student of southern black culture of the early twentieth century or of the African belief systems that influenced it. During the same years that Robert Johnson played the blues, Harry Middleton Hyatt, an Anglican minister and folklorist, conducted extensive research into prevailing notions about magical spells, folk medicine, witchcraft, and conjuring in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. He interviewed 1,600 people in the South and compiled 13,458 spells and superstitions—all published in a five-volume study that spanned 4,766 pages. Here we find the actual roots of the culture and belief systems that spawned the Robert Johnson legend, which has nothing to do with the ideas of 1960s music fans, but arose directly from the attitudes and metaphysical systems prevalent in the Mississippi Delta at the time when blues musicians started making records. Misguided attempts to remove these belief systems from the life stories of blues musicians constitute nothing less than a rewriting of history. Purified blues is falsified blues.⁷

但罗伯特·约翰逊也为布鲁斯音乐的合法化进程做出了不小的贡献。事实上，这是他遗产的重要组成部分。约翰逊在调和布鲁斯音乐固有的非洲元素与主流西方音乐文化的毕达哥拉斯数学范式方面发挥了主导作用。他整理并规范了自己掌握的技巧，并控制了布鲁斯音乐中较为桀骜不驯的元素，将晶莹剔透的和声感和清晰明确的词汇——音型、经过和弦、布吉节奏型、律动——融入到尖锐的三角洲音乐风格中。他演奏的每首歌曲都经过了整体构思和美学上的圆润呈现。他的音乐不像桑·豪斯、盲人莱蒙·杰斐逊、查理·帕顿以及其他许多前辈的布鲁斯音乐那样粗粝。相比之下，约翰逊的作品体现了一个体系——因此更适合抄写、研究和模仿。如果“蓝调科学”这个词不意味着冷漠和不理智，我几乎想称之为“蓝调科学”。没人能指责约翰逊在艺术上冷漠。但他带来了清晰的构思和精准的执行，将一种准民谣的实践转化为一种新型的西方艺术歌曲。

But Robert Johnson also contributed, in no small part, to the process of legitimization. In fact, this is a key part of his legacy. Johnson played a leading role in reconciling the inherent African elements of the blues with the Pythagorean, mathematical paradigm of the dominant Western music culture. He codified the techniques he mastered and reined in the more unruly elements of the blues, imposing a crystal clear harmonic sensibility and a sharply delineated vocabulary—figures, passing chords, boogie patterns, grooves—onto the prickly Delta idiom. Each song he performed came across as holistically conceived and aesthetically rounded. His music wasn’t as raw as the blues of, say, Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, and many of his other predecessors. Johnson’s oeuvre, in contrast, embodied a system—and, as such, was more suitable for transcribing, studying, and emulating. I would almost be tempted to call it a science of the blues, if that term didn’t imply coldness and dispassion. No one could accuse Johnson of artistic aloofness. But he brought a clarity of conception and precision of execution that transformed a quasi-folk practice into a new kind of Western art song.

尽管罗伯特·约翰逊如此伟大，他却并非我最钟爱的布鲁斯艺术家。我更欣赏桑·豪斯那种萨满式的狂野，或是斯基普·詹姆斯那种阴郁的忧郁。但我完全理解为什么后世的吉他手——甚至像埃里克·克莱普顿、鲍勃·迪伦和滚石乐队这样的超级巨星——都把约翰逊推崇得无以复加。他成功地将音乐行业的苛刻要求与非洲表演风格中那种明显的暴躁性完美地融合在一起。他并非孤军奋战。我们也必须赞扬WC·汉迪、贝西·史密斯、巴迪·博尔登、马迪·沃特斯、嚎叫之狼、BB·金以及其他许多杰出的音乐家。但约翰逊他是这个精英群体中最杰出的成员，堪称处于十字路口的音乐家中最引人注目的典范——我指的可不是与魔鬼的交汇点。他一只脚踏入民谣音乐实践，另一只脚踏入商业娱乐，他流畅地将两者融合成充满灵感的三分钟歌曲，其精湛技艺至今无人能及。如果没有他的介入，很难想象未来半个世纪的流行音乐会以同样的方式发展。

For all his greatness, Robert Johnson isn’t my favorite blues artist. I am more drawn to the shamanistic excesses of Son House or the dark moodiness of Skip James. But I understand full well why later generations of guitarists—even superstars, such as Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones—idolized Johnson above all others. He somehow managed to reconcile the demands of the music business with the signifying irascibility of African performance practices. He wasn’t alone in this mission. We also must give credit to W. C. Handy, Bessie Smith, Buddy Bolden, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, and a host of others. But Johnson is the most exemplary member of this elite group, offering the most striking example of a musician at a crossroads—and I’m not talking about a meeting place with the devil. He had one foot in folkloric practice and the other in commercial entertainment, and his fluidity in forcing them together into inspired three-minute songs has never been surpassed. It’s hard to imagine the next half century of popular music unfolding in quite the same way without his intervention.

23

23

时髦的屁股

Funky Butt

如果你坚持认为音乐品味是由精英塑造的，你可能会认为，美国社会最边缘群体的一种区域性歌曲风格竟然能改变全球娱乐的进程，纯属偶然。但爵士乐也做到了同样的事，几乎与布鲁斯音乐同时期、以同样的速度征服了世界。同样，被鄙视的局外人用令人难以驾驭的音乐，至少在最初是这样。从哈佛大学到普利策奖，这些强大的机构最终都接受了它——但那只是在又一个漫长的冷却期之后。

If you persist in believing that musical tastes are shaped by elites, you might consider it a mere fluke that a regional song style from the most marginalized population in American society somehow managed to change the course of global entertainment. But jazz did the exact same thing, and managed this world-conquering triumph during almost the same time period as the blues, at almost the same pace. Here again, scorned outsiders set the tempo for mainstream culture with music too hot to handle, at least at first. Powerful institutions, from Harvard to the Pulitzer Prize, eventually embraced it—but only after another lengthy cooling-off period.

爵士乐和布鲁斯这两种音乐风格或许经常互相借鉴，但其内在的活力却截然不同。爵士乐是一种都市音乐，诞生于20世纪初西方世界最多元文化的城市——新奥尔良的喧嚣之中。爵士乐风格在大熔炉般的环境中蓬勃发展，因为它注重外在，渴望新的灵感来源。相比之下，布鲁斯音乐最初起源于最偏远的乡村地区，其审美之美更多地源于传承自过去的传统和遗产。在布鲁斯音乐中，你仍然可以听到非洲的格里奥——那些讲述社区故事和文化传承者——的歌唱。这些影响也回荡在爵士乐中，但爵士乐更具非洲未来主义的氛围，更能接受融合与蜕变的可能性。

The two idioms may often borrow from each other, but jazz and blues are essentially different in their inner dynamic. Jazz is an urban music that came out of the hustle and bustle of the most multicultural city in the Western world at the dawn of the twentieth century, New Orleans. The jazz idiom thrives in melting-pot situations, because it is outwardly focused and hungry for new sources of inspiration. The blues, in contrast, first emerged in the most isolated rural areas, and its aesthetic beauty has more to do with traditions and legacies preserved from the past. You can still hear the griots of Africa, those community storytellers and preservers of cultural lore, in the blues. These influences also reverberate in jazz, but with more of an Afrofuturist vibe, a greater receptiveness to the possibilities of synthesis and metamorphosis.

爵士乐自诞生之初就展现出非凡的吞噬和消化其他表演风格的能力，这一特质使其区别于所有其他民间艺术。爵士乐如此成功地吸收了拉格泰姆的切分音，以至于许多听众（至少在最初）认为这两种风格完全相同。然而，与斯科特·乔普林的拉格泰姆音乐不同，受拉格泰姆影响的新奥尔良爵士乐非常注重即兴创作，注重在作曲中即兴的变奏。爵士乐艺术家最终会根据他们进行这些即兴变奏的技巧来评判，尽管他们会演奏旋律，但他们也经常在个人表达的自由发挥中随意调整旋律，或者完全放弃旋律。

From its earliest days, jazz demonstrated a remarkable ability to devour and digest other performance styles, a trait that would distinguish it from all other folk arts. Jazz assimilated the syncopations of ragtime with such success that many listeners believed, at least at first, that the two styles were identical. Yet unlike the ragtime music of Scott Joplin, the rag-influenced jazz of New Orleans placed great emphasis on improvisation, on spur-of-the-moment alterations in the composition. Jazz artists were eventually evaluated on their skill in making these spontaneous changes, and though they would play the melody, they just as often played around with the melody, or abandoned it completely, in the free play of personal expression.

爵士音乐家也掌握了布鲁斯的弯音和十二小节结构。这似乎是显而易见的，但你却要意识到，新奥尔良的爵士乐手们竟然比纽约和其他大城市的爵士乐手们早几十年就了解了布鲁斯。杰利·罗尔·莫顿声称，他小时候就在新奥尔良的花园区听过布鲁斯，时间大概是在1900年后不久。而常被誉为第一位爵士乐队领队的巴迪·博尔登，可能在世纪之交之前就已经开始演奏布鲁斯了。大多数音乐史学家对此习以为常，但我们应该考虑到，在其他城市音乐家对这种低调的乡村音乐习语一无所知或公开嗤之以鼻的时候，新奥尔良人却欣然接受了布鲁斯，这是多么反常的现象。

Jazz musicians also mastered the bent notes and twelve-bar structures of the blues. This may seem an obvious move until you realize that New Orleans jazz players somehow learned about the blues decades before their peers in New York and other major cities. Jelly Roll Morton claimed he heard blues in the Garden District of New Orleans while still a child, probably not long after the year 1900. And Buddy Bolden, often credited as the first jazz bandleader, may have been performing blues even before the turn of the century. Most music historians take this for granted, yet we ought to consider the anomaly of New Orleans embracing blues at a time when other urban musicians were blissfully unaware or openly scornful of this humble rural idiom.

然而，博尔登也同样乐于从宗教音乐中汲取灵感，这些音乐是他在杰克逊和富兰克林浸信会教堂参加礼拜时听到的。“我知道他以前常去那座教堂，但不是为了宗教，”长号手基德·奥里（Kid Ory）后来解释道，他大约在1900年认识了博尔登。“他去那里是为了获得音乐灵感。他会听这些歌曲，然后稍加改动。”奥里还指出，长号、小号，甚至鼓有时会在教堂礼拜中与歌手一起演奏——这表明爵士乐与宗教音乐之间的影响是双向的。第一代爵士乐手的品味兼收并蓄，将这些元素与他们在舞会、铜管乐队游行、葬礼、野餐和其他社交活动中听到的歌曲和风格融合在一起。事实上，他们中的许多人正是在这样的环境中学习技艺的。然而，他们也汲取了一些很少被视为爵士乐传统的音乐风格，无论是在新奥尔良歌剧院演出的歌曲，还是来自拉丁美洲的客座乐团的音乐。从一开始，爵士乐的风格就建立在超越音乐界限之上^。1

Yet Bolden was just as willing to draw inspiration from religious music, which he heard while attending services at the Baptist church on Jackson and Franklin. “I know that he used to go to that church, but not for religion,” later explained Kid Ory, a trombonist who met Bolden around the year 1900. “He went there to get ideas on music. He’d hear these songs and would change them a little.” Ory also specified that trombones, trumpets, and even drums would sometimes join in with singers at church services—suggesting that influences between jazz and religious music went both ways. The first generation of jazz musicians, omnivorous in their tastes, mixed these ingredients with songs and styles they heard at dances, brass band parades, funerals, and picnics and other social events. In fact, many of them learned their trade in such settings. Yet they also drew from idioms rarely considered as part of the jazz tradition, whether songs performed in the New Orleans opera houses or the music of visiting ensembles from Latin America. From the start, the jazz idiom was built on transgressing musical boundaries.¹

还有其他界限。我们所知最古老的原创爵士乐是一首名为《Funky Butt》的粗俗作品。这首歌是巴迪·博尔登的标志性曲目，但每次演奏都会有所不同。歌词有时轻松愉快，有时则粗俗不堪。根据具体情况，它可能被用作喜剧、侮辱，甚至是政治评论。当局对这种即兴演奏并不友好。“如果警察听到你唱这首歌，就会把你关进监狱，”新奥尔良单簧管演奏家西德尼·贝切特（Sidney Bechet）解释道。他回忆起在一次活动中亲耳听到博尔登演奏这首歌：“博尔登开始演奏他的主题曲，人们开始唱，警察开始鞭打人头。”我们再次发现，当今一种受人尊敬的音乐风格起源于边缘地带，其大胆的风格激怒了权力掮客，甚至煽动了暴力。下次你在音乐厅听到爵士乐时，请记住，它有记录的历史始于一首非法且引发骚乱的歌曲。²

And other boundaries as well. The oldest original jazz song known to us is a nasty piece of work called “Funky Butt.” This song was Buddy Bolden’s trademark, but it could change each time it was played. Sometimes the words were lighthearted, at other times obscene. Depending on the circumstances, it might serve as comedy or insult or even political commentary. The authorities did not look kindly on such improvisations. “The police put you in jail if they heard you singing that song,” explained New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet. He recalled hearing Bolden play it in person at one event: “Bolden started his theme song, people started singing, policemen began whipping heads.” Here again we find that a respected musical idiom of the current day originated on the fringes, infuriating power brokers with its audacity and even inciting violence. The next time you hear jazz in a concert hall, recall that its documented history began with an illegal and riot-provoking song.²

爵士乐手们以其大胆的风格为傲，但在早期，他们也渴望娱乐观众。几十年来，爵士乐积累了如此多的尊重，以至于我们很容易忽视爵士乐是如何凭借纯粹的喜悦和愉悦征服世界的。巴迪·博尔登从未录制过唱片（即使他录制过，也已不复存在），但亲身经历证明了他作为表演者和观众欣赏者的高超技艺。在这方面，他为后来的爵士乐明星树立了榜样。

Jazz musicians took pride in their boldness, but already at this early stage they also wanted to entertain their audiences. So much respectability has been piled upon this music over the decades that we can easily lose sight of how jazz conquered the world through sheer joy and delight. Buddy Bolden never made records (or if he did, they haven’t survived), but firsthand accounts testify to his skill as a showman and a crowd-pleaser. In this regard, he set a pattern for the jazz stars who came after him.

路易斯·阿姆斯特朗最令人难忘的应该是他在 20 世纪 20 年代末和 30 年代初的非凡录音，当时他为爵士乐建立了新的黄金标准，例如例如“西区蓝调”、“土豆头蓝调”和“毛骨悚然”等。阿姆斯特朗构建了全新的音乐词汇，创造了无数原创乐句，近一个世纪后仍被音乐家们模仿，并将爵士乐流派变成了真正的独奏曲。然而对于普通大众来说，阿姆斯特朗的巨大名气与小号的滑稽表演关系不大，而是依靠他精湛的艺人和极具魅力的个性——这些资产确保了他在广播、电影和（最终）电视领域的跨界成功。一些严肃的爵士乐迷可能会认为阿姆斯特朗的热门唱片“Hello Dolly！”和“What a Wonderful World”是商业噱头，是与他的艺术造诣不符的音乐滑稽动作。然而他们忽略了一点：爵士乐从一开始就不是供内行人欣赏的高雅事物。它更像是一种旨在劝诱信徒的狂喜宗教，一种通过狂喜和迷惑来使非信徒皈依的仪式。如果阿姆斯特朗没有在一种参与式的欣快氛围中向大众传达他个人的祝福和崇敬，他的英雄事迹就永远不可能改变音乐界。

By all rights, Louis Armstrong ought to be best remembered for his extraordinary recordings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he established a new gold standard for jazz on tracks such as “West End Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” and “Heebie Jeebies,” among others. Armstrong constructed a whole new music vocabulary, inventing countless original phrases that musicians still imitate almost a century later, and turned the jazz genre into a true soloist’s idiom. Yet for the general public, Armstrong’s enormous fame had little to do with trumpet hijinks, and drew instead on his consummate skills as an entertainer and his charismatic personality—assets that ensured his crossover success in radio, movies, and (eventually) television. Some serious jazz fans perhaps dismiss Armstrong’s hit recordings “Hello Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World” as commercial fluff, musical antics that don’t do justice to his artistry. Yet they miss the point: jazz from its inception wasn’t a respectable highbrow affair for knowledgeable insiders. It had more in common with an ecstatic religion that aimed to proselytize, a ritual that converted nonbelievers through rapture and enchantment. Armstrong’s heroics could never have changed the music world if he hadn’t delivered his personal beatitudes and exaltations to the masses in an environment of participative euphoria.

同样的模式在爵士乐的演变过程中反复出现。以艾灵顿公爵为例，他是爵士乐早期唯一一位能与阿姆斯特朗的影响力相媲美的创新者。如今，艾灵顿被认为是美国顶尖作曲家，他的名字经常与音乐厅的典范人物并列。他当之无愧地获得了这样的赞誉，他最伟大的作品令人不禁与伊戈尔·斯特拉文斯基、阿隆·科普兰、德米特里·肖斯塔科维奇和贝拉·巴托克等同时代作曲家的作品相媲美。我尤其欣赏艾灵顿在20世纪30年代末和40年代初的录音，这些录音在形式和内容之间达到了完美的平衡，其他爵士作曲家都无法与之相比。但这一时期他的音乐最引人注目之处在于：艾灵顿同时也是一位名人艺人，并且是世界上唱片销量最高的流行音乐明星之一。如果不考虑这种迎合大众市场的因素，我们就不能充分肯定他的精湛技艺。

The same pattern recurs repeatedly in the evolution of jazz. Consider the case of Duke Ellington, the only innovator of the early decades of the idiom who could rival Armstrong’s impact and influence. Ellington is now considered an elite American composer, and his name is often mentioned alongside the paragons of the concert hall. He deserves this acclaim, and his greatest works invite comparisons with his contemporaries, such as Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Béla Bartók. I especially admire Ellington’s recordings from the late 1930s and early 1940s, which achieve a radiant balancing of form and content unsurpassed by other jazz composers. But here’s the most remarkable aspect of this period in his music: Ellington was also a celebrity entertainer during this same era, and one of the biggest-selling popular music stars in the world. We cannot give full credit to his mastery without factoring in this crowd-pleasing mass-market angle.

20 世纪 30 年代末最炙手可热的乐队领队本尼·古德曼也是如此，他是一位单簧管演奏家，委托科普兰和巴托克创作古典作品，同时也指挥着最受欢迎的舞蹈那个时期的管弦乐队。或者想想爵士乐明星伍迪·赫尔曼的例子，他的乐队于1946年3月在卡内基音乐厅首演了斯特拉文斯基的《乌木协奏曲》，但几个月后却在好莱坞电影《新奥尔良》中演奏了轻松的舞曲。当然，并非那个时代的每一位爵士乐表演者都与著名的欧洲作曲家合作。伯爵·贝西、比莉·霍利戴、艾拉·菲茨杰拉德、格伦·米勒、阿蒂·肖以及二战期间的其他热门乐队领队都有不同的计划，不需要欣德米特或勋伯格的参与，但他们从未动摇过保持高艺术水平的决心，同时也要取悦观众并销售唱片。

The same is true of the hottest bandleader of the late 1930s, Benny Goodman, a clarinetist who commissioned classical works from Copland and Bartók, yet also led the most popular dance orchestra of the period. Or consider the case of jazz star Woody Herman, whose band performed the debut of Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto at Carnegie Hall in March 1946, but a few months later served up lighthearted dance music in the Hollywood film New Orleans. Of course, not every jazz performer of that era collaborated with a famous European composer. Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, and other hit-parade bandleaders of the World War II years had different agendas that didn’t require the participation of a Hindemith or a Schoenberg, but they never wavered in their determination to maintain a high level of artistry while also pleasing audiences and selling records.

然而，我们也不得不惊叹于这些娱乐性歌曲中蕴含了多少社会抗议、颠覆和不敬。在国会通过《民权法案》整整一代人之前，本尼·古德曼就利用他作为流行文化英雄的卓越地位来推动种族隔离。1935年，他的商业成功迎来了摇摆时代，开启了激动人心的十年，在此期间，炙手可热的大乐队爵士乐一直占据着美国流行音乐的前沿。第二年，古德曼聘请了非裔美国钢琴家泰迪·威尔逊加入他的三重奏——这比杰基·罗宾逊加入布鲁克林道奇队打破职业体育界的肤色界限早了十多年。古德曼最大的竞争对手单簧管演奏家阿蒂·肖在1938年聘请了歌手比莉·霍利戴，其他爵士乐队领队不愿在爵士乐界接受这种新的宽容态度时被抛在后面，也纷纷效仿，开展了自己的反种族隔离运动。

Yet we also must marvel at how much social protest, disruption, and irreverence got embedded into these entertaining songs. Benny Goodman used his preeminence as a pop culture hero to promote desegregation a full generation before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. In 1935, his commercial success ushered in the Swing Era, setting off a stirring decade during which hot big-band jazz stayed at the forefront of popular music in America. The very next year, Goodman hired African American pianist Teddy Wilson for his trio—more than a decade before Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking down the color line in professional sports. Clarinetist Artie Shaw, Goodman’s biggest rival, hired vocalist Billie Holiday in 1938, and other jazz bandleaders, unwilling to be left behind as the jazz world embraced this new attitude of tolerance, followed suit with their own anti-segregation efforts.

在美国社会背景下，这些举动堪称惊天动地。流行音乐是美国社会第一个废除种族隔离的重要领域，而超级巨星爵士音乐家则引领了这一潮流。在接下来的岁月里，他们继续在废除种族隔离的斗争中扮演着关键角色。1957年，路易斯·阿姆斯特朗因批评德怀特·D·艾森豪威尔总统拒绝在阿肯色州小石城推行学校种族融合政策而登上头条新闻。这位小号手以乐天派艺人的身份而闻名，不参与政治，因此他的言论更加刺耳。阿姆斯特朗随后面临着强烈的反对——一些批评者甚至烧毁了他的唱片，并呼吁抵制他的音乐会。然而，在阿姆斯特朗那次爆炸性采访一周后，艾森豪威尔改变了政策，命令国民警卫队介入小石城。当然，我们不能把艾森豪威尔的改变归咎于一位爵士乐明星的随口一说，但《芝加哥卫报》声称阿姆斯特朗的话“时机恰到好处，爆炸力也堪比氢弹，在世界各地引起强烈反响”，这倒也并非空穴来风^。3

In the context of American society, these were earthshaking moves. Popular music was the first important sphere in American society to desegregate, and superstar jazz musicians led the way. And they continued to play a key role in the desegregation battles at every step during the years ahead. In 1957, Louis Armstrong made headline news with his criticism of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s refusal to enforce school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. The trumpeter’s words stung all the more because of his reputation as a happy-go-lucky entertainer who didn’t get involved in politics. Armstrong now faced an intense backlash—some critics even burned his records and called for a boycott of his concerts. But a week after Armstrong’s explosive interview, Eisenhower changed his policy and ordered the National Guard to intervene in Little Rock. We can’t, of course, assign Ike’s change of heart to the offhand comments of a jazz star, but the Chicago Defender wasn’t far off when it claimed that Armstrong’s words “had both the timing and the explosive effect of an H-bomb. They reverberated around the world.”³

所有改变世界的音乐风格，无论其起源多么偏离主流，最终都会获得合法化和尊重。在大多数情况下，这种转变并非见诸报端，而是逐渐体现在观众的态度和机构的政策中。就爵士乐而言，音乐本身既预示了这种转变，也加速了这种转变。甚至在公众将爵士乐视为一种艺术音乐之前，音乐家们就已怀揣着远大的抱负。一种实验性的、近乎前卫的情感在爵士乐界早期就已出现，并且从未消散——你至今仍能在这个流派中听到它——尽管当时的生态系统将音乐家们变成了平庸的商业艺人。我们从短号演奏家比克斯·贝德贝克（1903-1931）的双重职业生涯中就能看到这一点：他既能用甜美的独奏取悦舞者，也能以尖锐的新现代主义风格创作钢琴曲。我们在科尔曼·霍金斯（1904-1969）的萨克斯作品中也遇到了类似的悖论。他凭借《Body and Soul》在点唱机上大获成功，同时又突破了爵士乐的和声界限。或者，不妨看看阿特·塔图姆（1909-1956），他的音乐根基在于拉格泰姆、布鲁斯、布吉、哈莱姆跨步钢琴和音乐小巷的旋律——但他的即兴演奏技艺精湛、华丽非凡，令人不禁将其与古典键盘音乐的标志性大师相提并论。

All world-changing music styles, no matter how far outside the mainstream their origins, eventually achieve legitimization and respect. In most instances, this shift is not announced in newspaper headlines, but takes place gradually in the attitudes of audiences and the policies of institutions. In the case of jazz, the music itself both anticipated and accelerated the shift. Even before the general public embraced jazz as a kind of art music, the musicians nurtured grand ambitions. An experimental, almost avant-garde sensibility emerged in the jazz world at an early stage, and never left it—you can still hear it in the genre today—despite an ecosystem that turned musicians into workaday commercial entertainers. We see this in the bifurcated career of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931), who could delight dancers with his sweet-toned solos, but also compose piano music in a prickly, neo-modernist style. We encounter a similar paradox in the saxophone work of Coleman Hawkins (1904–1969), who could achieve a jukebox hit with “Body and Soul,” yet simultaneously push ahead the harmonic frontiers of the jazz idiom. Or consider the case of Art Tatum (1909–1956), whose musical roots lay in ragtime, blues, boogie, Harlem stride piano, and Tin Pan Alley tunes—but his improvisations were so virtuosic and extravagant that they invited comparisons with the iconic masters of classical keyboard music.

在爵士乐横跨流行娱乐和艺术歌曲领域的历史中，有两位人物格外引人注目：艾灵顿公爵和乔治·格什温。如果说本尼·古德曼聘请阿伦·科普兰是为了寻求合法性——“我付了两千美元，这可是真金白银，”这位单簧管演奏家后来夸耀道——那么艾灵顿和格什温则旨在证明他们与同时代“严肃”作曲家处于同一水平。艾灵顿或许比爵士乐早期任何其他人物都更能以近乎心灵感应的敏锐洞察力预见到这种新型流行音乐的最终命运。他深知爵士乐终将作为艺术音乐获得广泛认可，而不必为此放弃其对摇摆乐和即兴演奏的执着。事实上，爵士乐走向受人尊敬的独特道路要求它保持自身的核心价值，保留布鲁斯、切分音、激情独奏以及其技艺中所有其他标志性元素^。4

Two figures stand out in this history of jazz straddling popular entertainment and art song ambitions: Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. If Benny Goodman sought legitimization by hiring Aaron Copland—“I paid two thousand dollars and that’s real money,” the clarinetist later boasted—Ellington and Gershwin aimed to prove they were on the same level as the ‘serious’ composers of their day. Ellington, perhaps more than any other figure from the early days of jazz, anticipated with almost telepathic clarity the eventual destiny of this new style of popular music. He understood that jazz would gain widespread acceptance as art music, and wouldn’t have to give up its commitment to swing and spontaneity as part of the bargain. In fact, the peculiar path of jazz to respectability required it to maintain its own core values, holding onto the blues, syncopation, hot solos, and all the other calling cards of its craft.⁴

然而，艾灵顿或许是被诅咒了，因为他比社会其他人更早预见到了这种命运。1943 年，当他在卡内基音乐厅推出他最具野心的延长作品、长达近一小时的万花筒音诗《黑色、棕色和米色》时，爵士乐界内外都对他做出了尖刻而冷漠的回应。黑人音乐的倡导者约翰·哈蒙德在出版物上攻击艾灵顿放弃爵士乐，作曲家保罗·鲍尔斯也加入进来，发表长篇大论，不仅驳斥了《黑色、棕色和米色》 ，而且驳斥了所有将爵士乐转变为艺术音乐的尝试。许多其他评论家称这部作品混乱、过分、自我意识强，甚至陈词滥调。当然，今天的共识是，《黑色、棕色和米色》是美国音乐的杰作。但在当时，这些批评是刺痛的。艾灵顿则停止了整部作品的表演，并且再也没有尝试过这种规模的延长作品。幸运的是，这次挫折并未对他的自信或天赋造成沉重的打击——艾灵顿几乎不需要一个小时的时间来演奏杰作，他完全有能力，甚至可以说是独一无二的资质，创作出三四分钟的非凡作品。然而，我们不禁要问，音乐界的这种奇怪的合法化过程，竟然将这些有远见卓识的人尊为真正的艺术家，却在几十年后才得以实现——这首先惩罚了他们试图超越单纯艺人地位的努力。斯科特·乔普林、艾灵顿公爵和其他杰出的黑人作曲家都能预见最终的结局，并努力加速这一进程，但社会不允许局外人走捷径，他们作为圈内人士的重生几乎总是需要几十年的时间，有时甚至在他们去世很久之后。

Yet Ellington was perhaps cursed for seeing this destiny before the rest of society. When he introduced his most ambitious extended work, the almost one-hour-long kaleidoscopic tone poem Black, Brown and Beige, at Carnegie Hall in 1943, he was rewarded with sharp-tongued, unsympathetic responses from both inside and outside the jazz community. John Hammond, an influential advocate of black music, attacked Ellington in print for abandoning jazz, and composer Paul Bowles chimed in with a diatribe that dismissed not only Black, Brown and Beige, but all attempts to transform jazz into art music. A host of other critics called out the work as confused, fulsome, self-conscious, even corny. Of course, the consensus view today is that Black, Brown and Beige is a masterpiece of American music. But at the time, these criticisms stung. Ellington, for his part, stopped performing the work in its entirety, and never again attempted an extended piece on this scale. We are fortunate that this setback did not place a heavy burden on his confidence or genius—Ellington hardly needed an hour-long time slot to perform a masterpiece, and was perfectly capable, or perhaps even uniquely qualified, to turn out extraordinary works of three or four minutes’ duration. Yet we can’t help wondering at the strange process of musical legitimization that honors these visionaries as true artists, but only decades after the fact—first punishing their attempts to rise above the status of mere entertainers. Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, and other preeminent black composers could see the eventual endpoint, and worked to accelerate the process, but society doesn’t allow any shortcuts for outsiders, whose rebirth as insiders almost always takes place over a period of decades, and sometimes long after they are dead.

乔治·格什温则展现了更为奇特的矛盾。他短暂的一生中，以融合爵士乐和古典音乐风格而闻名，然而他却从未涉足过这两个领域。这位出生于1898年的俄罗斯犹太移民之子，15岁时辍学，进入“音乐小巷”（Tin Pan Alley）——当时以曼哈顿西二十八街为中心，代表纽约商业歌曲出版业——寻求职业发展。格什温于1919年创作了他的第一首热门歌曲《斯瓦尼》（Swanee），这是一首晚期吟游诗人的曲调，后来成为歌手艾尔·乔森（Al Jolson）的标志性曲目。之后，他创作了大约三十场百老汇演出，并创作了数十首如今被视为美国流行音乐经典的歌曲，这些歌曲通常与他的作词家兄弟艾拉合作创作。在那个时代，黑人音乐已经深深地吸引了“音乐小巷”，尽管当时的词曲作者通常是白人。例如，欧文·柏林的《亚历山大拉格泰姆乐队》（1911年）、杰罗姆·科恩的《老人河》（1927年）和霍吉·卡迈克尔的《星尘》（1927年）等热门歌曲分别从拉格泰姆、圣歌和爵士乐中汲取灵感。但它们的目标受众是美国主流观众，他们要求朗朗上口的旋律、适合跳舞的节奏和令人难忘的歌词。格什温在这个音乐领域的技巧无人能及；他完全可以把自己的整个职业生涯都奉献给音乐创作者，为最广泛的大众创作流行歌曲。

George Gershwin presents an even stranger contradiction. He gained fame in his own abbreviated lifetime as a musical prestidigitator who fused jazz and classical idioms, yet he had a background in neither field. This son of Russian Jewish immigrants, born in 1898, dropped out of school at age fifteen to pursue a career in Tin Pan Alley, the name given to New York’s commercial song publishing industry, then centered on West Twenty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. Gershwin wrote his first hit in 1919, “Swanee,” a late-vintage minstrel tune that would become a trademark number for singer Al Jolson, and went on to compose around thirty Broadway shows and produce dozens of songs now considered classics of American popular music, often in collaboration with his lyricist brother Ira. Tin Pan Alley was already under the spell of black music during this era, even if the songwriters themselves were usually white. Hit songs such as Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911), Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River” (1927), and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Star Dust” (1927), for example, drew on rag, spirituals, and jazz, respectively, for inspiration. But they were targeted at the mainstream American audience, which demanded catchy melodies, danceable rhythms, and memorable words. Gershwin’s skill in this musical marketplace was unsurpassed; he could easily have spent his entire career as a tunesmith, creating pop songs for the widest general public.

但一位来自乐队指挥保罗·怀特曼的不寻常委托改变了这一切。怀特曼想在 1924 年 2 月纽约伊奥利亚音乐厅的一场音乐会上展示一部融合爵士乐和古典音乐影响的令人印象深刻的作品。格什温为这场活动创作的作品《蓝色狂想曲》最终获得了巨大的成功，它将我们的音乐小巷歌曲作者转变为美国最炙手可热的年轻古典作曲家。格什温抓住了这个机会重塑自我，继续推进他后续的管弦乐代表作《一个美国人在巴黎》和《F 大调协奏曲》，并最终在 1937 年去世前上演了民歌《波吉与贝丝》。然而，这些作品的巨大成功不应让我们忽视这样一个事实：在格什温的跨界之路之后，同时代的其他作曲家也很少取得商业成功。交响乐团美国可能为乔治·格什温破例，但他们还没有准备好将交响爵士乐作为其使命的常规部分。你也许认为，格什温的爵士古典作品被奉为经典将为整整一代黑人爵士音乐家打开大门，使他们成为管弦乐作曲家，但事实并非如此。这并不是对格什温的打击，他的作品值得称赞并被载入标准曲目。但我们应该认识到爵士时代更大的不协调性，现在这个名字赋予了产生《蓝色狂想曲》的时代。在公众心目中，那个时期的标志性人物（F. 斯科特·菲茨杰拉德、保罗·怀特曼、乔治·格什温）往往是那些充当爵士精神进入主流的渠道的人，而不是真正的爵士音乐家本身——后者仍然被排除在时尚社会的最高层之外。这种紧张不稳定的局面，在诸多社会经济断层的影响下，既证明了早期爵士乐的力量（大众显然渴望它），也证明了它非法的地位。而这种非法地位并非仅仅停留在表面：当年轻放荡的人们前往那些非法活动猖獗的地方（禁酒令时期的饮酒、赌博、卖淫），他们期望听到的是真正的爵士乐，而不是《蓝色狂想曲》。

But an unusual commission from a bandleader—Paul Whiteman, who wanted to showcase an impressive work mixing jazz and classical influences at a February 1924 concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall—changed all this. The tremendous success eventually enjoyed by Rhapsody in Blue, the work Gershwin produced for this event, would transform our Tin Pan Alley songwriter into the hottest young classical composer in America. Gershwin seized on this opportunity to reinvent himself, pushing ahead with his follow-up orchestral showpieces An American in Paris and Concerto in F, and eventually staging the folk opera Porgy and Bess before his death in 1937. Yet the huge success of these works should not blind us to the fact that few other composers of the day had much commercial success following Gershwin’s crossover path. The symphony orchestras of the United States may have made an exception for George Gershwin, but they were hardly ready for symphonic jazz as a regular part of their mission. You might think that the canonization of Gershwin’s jazzy classical works would have opened the door for an entire generation of black jazz musicians to establish themselves as orchestral composers, but nothing of that sort took place. This is no knock against Gershwin, whose works deserve acclaim and enshrinement in the standard repertoire. But we ought to recognize the larger incongruity of the Jazz Age, the name now assigned to the era that produced Rhapsody in Blue. The emblematic figures of that period in the minds of the general public (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Whiteman, George Gershwin) were often those who served as conduits for the jazz spirit to enter the mainstream, rather than actual jazz musicians themselves—the latter were still excluded from the highest rungs of fashionable society. This tense and unstable situation, underpinned by many socioeconomic fault lines, testified both to the power of early jazz, which the mass audience clearly craved, and to its outlaw status. And this outlaw status was more than just image: when the young and dissolute went to places where illegal activities took place (drinking during the Prohibition era, gambling, prostitution), they expected to hear real jazz, not Rhapsody in Blue.

音乐史学家应该更深入地探究艾灵顿与格什温之间明显的竞争关系，而这在关于格什温的学术研究中很少被提及。在《波吉与贝丝》首演后，艾灵顿曾向一位记者发表过激烈的言论，声称格什温从各种各样的来源窃取了其音乐的关键元素（“他借鉴了从李斯特到迪基·威尔斯的卡祖笛乐队的所有人的作品”），并暗示他自己的抱负受到谋生和取悦观众的需求的制约。这些言论发表后，艾灵顿予以否认，但这些言论是否歪曲了他的观点，还是仅仅不适合公开发表，仍是一个悬而未决的问题。在随后的几年里，艾灵顿偶尔会录制和演唱格什温的歌曲，尽管次数不多，而且很可能没有多少热情。格什温去世后，艾灵顿会做出一些礼貌的评论，虽然公爵很少评论他的对手，但礼貌始终是公爵回避不愿公开讨论的问题的方式。单簧管演奏家巴尼·比加德 (Barney Bigard) 声称艾灵顿拒绝了格什温合作创作歌曲的提议，这更能说明问题。正如这则轶事所示，这种竞争可能只是单向的。种种迹象表明，格什温非常崇敬艾灵顿，并从这位乐队指挥的榜样中学习。而且，这很可能只是激起了艾灵顿的愤怒，正如上面关于格什温借鉴作品的评论所暗示的那样。艾灵顿去世时，正在创作一部名为《女王派》的准歌剧舞台音乐剧——这个项目他早在 40 年前，即 20 世纪 30 年代就已构思，现在正在将其打造为他的最后一部作品。我认为，说他仍然对《波吉与贝丝》耿耿于怀并不过分，或许是因为格什温在艾灵顿还在舞厅表演的时候就上演了一部非裔美国人歌剧而心怀怨恨^。5

Music historians should probe more deeply into Ellington’s apparent rivalry with Gershwin, a subject rarely addressed in scholarship on these figures. After the premiere of Porgy and Bess, Ellington offered up testy words to a journalist, asserting that Gershwin had pilfered key elements of his music from a hodgepodge of sources (“he borrowed from everyone from Liszt to Dickie Wells’ kazoo band”), and suggesting that his own ambitions were constrained by the demands of earning a living and pleasing audiences. After these comments appeared in print, Ellington disavowed them, but it’s an open question whether they misrepresented his views or just weren’t meant for public airing. Ellington occasionally recorded and performed Gershwin songs in subsequent years, although not very often, and quite likely without much enthusiasm. After Gershwin’s death, Ellington would make polite comments and observations about his rival, but politeness was always the Duke’s way of deflecting issues he preferred not to discuss in public. More revealing is clarinetist Barney Bigard’s claim that Ellington refused Gershwin’s proposal to collaborate on songs. As that anecdote suggests, the rivalry probably only went one way. By all indications, Gershwin had great reverence for Ellington, and learned from the bandleader’s example. And in all likelihood, this merely inflamed Ellington’s irritation, as the above comment about Gershwin’s borrowings implies. At the time of his death, Ellington was working on a quasi-operatic stage musical titled Queenie Pie—a project he had first conceived almost forty years earlier, back in the 1930s, and was now crafting as his final opus. I don’t think it’s going too far to say he was still stewing over Porgy and Bess, perhaps nurturing a grudge over Gershwin having staged an African American opera while Ellington was still playing in dance halls.⁵

如上所述，艾灵顿在公共场合的礼貌和得体是出了名的。1965年，普利策奖委员会否决了音乐评审团授予艾灵顿的奖项建议，这位乐队领队慎重的回应正是他精心打造的外表的典型体现：“命运待我很仁慈。命运不希望我太年轻就出名。” 但下一代爵士乐创新者的态度更为强硬、尖锐，对在舞厅里取悦舞者或在点唱机前赚取点滴小钱几乎毫无兴趣。20世纪40年代的现代爵士乐运动公开接受了其局外人的身份。节奏变得更快——通常快到让人无法舒适地跳舞。旋律和节奏呈现出新的复杂性，并开启了爵士乐和流行音乐之间的分野，这种分野在接下来的几十年里愈演愈烈^。6

As noted, Ellington’s politeness and propriety in public settings were legendary. When the Pulitzer board rejected its music jury’s recommendation that Ellington receive the honor in 1965, the bandleader’s measured comment was typical of this well-honed facade: “Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.” But the next generation of jazz innovators had tougher, edgier attitudes, and showed little interest in pleasing dancers on the ballroom floor or attracting nickels and dimes at the jukebox. The modern jazz movement of the 1940s openly embraced its outsider status. Tempos got faster—often too fast for comfortable dancing. Melodies and rhythms took on new complexity, and set in motion a separation between jazz and popular music that would widen in subsequent decades.⁶

比波普（bebop） ——这个拟声词后来被冠以这种音乐的标签——的早期领袖们，受到的是反主流文化而非主流的欢迎。萨克斯手查理·帕克、小号手迪兹·吉莱斯皮，以及钢琴家塞隆尼斯·蒙克和巴德·鲍威尔，都没能有幸看到自己的热门单曲登上排行榜。相反，在爵士乐成为主流的时代，他们重新确立了爵士乐的“异类”地位。而他们不愿接受跨界音乐，恰恰加速了爵士乐的……爵士乐的实验和创新步伐加快。二战结束后的二十年，爵士乐的创造力蓬勃发展，同时也标志着该流派的领军艺术家逐渐退出流行文化。尽管——或许正因为——其受众群体不断萎缩，爵士乐作为一种艺术形式依然蓬勃发展。即使在今天，各种最受铁杆乐迷珍视的爵士乐经典曲目榜单上，也充斥着那些在20世纪40年代末到60年代末达到职业生涯巅峰的艺术家，他们不仅包括比波普爵士乐手，还包括他们所指导的下一代，包括迈尔斯·戴维斯、约翰·柯川、查尔斯·明格斯等。

The early leaders of bebop, the onomatopoeic label that would get attached to this sound, were embraced by the counterculture, not the mainstream. Saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell would never have the pleasure of watching one of their hit singles climb the charts. Instead, they reasserted jazz’s outlaw status at a time when the music had gone mainstream. And their very willingness to walk away from crossover acceptance served to accelerate the pace of experimentation and innovation in the idiom. The twenty years following the end of World War II thus marked both a tremendous burst of jazz creativity and a simultaneous withdrawal of the genre’s leading artists from popular culture. Jazz flourished as an art form despite—or perhaps because of—its shrinking audience. Even today, various lists of the jazz classics most cherished by serious fans are dominated by the artists whose careers peaked during the period from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, not just the beboppers but the next generation that they mentored, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and others.

这是一条不同的合法化之路，无需音乐界统治机构的默许。最终，这些机构也会顺势而为——爵士乐甚至会随着时间的推移被重新命名为“美国古典音乐”——但那已是后期发展，几乎是后遗症。迈尔斯·戴维斯不需要荣誉学位来证明他对艺术的认真程度；约翰·柯川、奥内特·科尔曼或其他许多在20世纪下半叶登上巅峰的爵士乐偶像也无需如此。即使他们融合了流行文化元素，例如戴维斯在其开创性的专辑《Bitches Brew》 （1970）中融入摇滚元素，音乐中仍然弥漫着某种刺耳的异质性。 《Bitches Brew》售出了50万张，这是戴维斯的一个新里程碑，但你绝不会把他误认为是一位艺人。他在舞台上最著名的三个习惯是：背对观众演奏、演出中途退场以及保持严肃的表情——他脸上几乎不露出一丝笑容。不用说，没人敢要求看他在茱莉亚学院的成绩单。

This was a different path of legitimization, one that required no acquiescence from the ruling institutions of the music world. Eventually the institutions would follow along—in time, jazz would even be rebranded as “America’s classical music”—but that was late in the game, almost an after-effect. Miles Davis didn’t need an honorary degree to prove how dead serious he was about his art; nor did John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman or a host of other jazz icons who rose to the top of their craft during the second half of the twentieth century. Even when they embraced elements of popular culture, as, for example, Davis did with rock in his seminal Bitches Brew (1970), a certain prickly otherness pervaded the music. Bitches Brew sold half a million copies, a new milestone for Davis, but you would never have mistaken him for an entertainer. The three most famous aspects of his onstage demeanor were playing with his back to the audience, walking offstage mid-performance, and keeping a serious demeanor—rarely did he let even a hint of a smile appear on his face. Needless to say, no one dared ask to see his Juilliard transcript.

我或许是在表达这样一种观点：二十世纪的音乐创新从来都不是来自拥有制度支持的白人精英。这种说法是误导。事实上，一连串颠覆性的音乐创作都源自那些受过西方音乐厅音乐传统熏陶的交响乐团和作曲家。在某些情况下，这些高雅的创作方式成功地引导了推动流行文化的那种原始能量——例如，当观众据称情绪失控时。1913 年斯特拉文斯基的《春之祭》首演时，以及 1923 年乔治·安塞尔的瑞典芭蕾舞团演出时。（后一次骚乱甚至被马塞尔·勒比耶拍摄成电影，他实际上可能煽动了这场骚乱，为他的电影《非人》创造一个合适的场景。）我们的音乐流派和社会分层模式会将“Funky Butt”和《春之祭》等作品划分为不同的领域，即低俗和高雅，理论上它们彼此毫无关联，但在实践中，二十世纪文化中颠覆和超越的热情将不分国界，并超越所有传统的阶级界限。在下一章中，我们将探讨摇滚表演与仪式暴力行为之间惊人的联系。然而，即使在20世纪初的古典音乐界，我们早已预见到人们对阿尔塔蒙特和性手枪乐队在冬日乐园的最后演出的期待。作曲家们越来越被视为煽动者，他们的音乐如今被期待着扰乱和煽动。

Perhaps I am conveying the idea that musical innovations of the twentieth century never came from white elites with institutional backing. That would be misleading. In fact, a whole flurry of subversive music-making arose from symphony orchestras and composers schooled in the traditions of Western concert hall music. And in some instances, these highbrow excursions managed to channel the same kind of raw energy propelling popular culture—for example, when audience members allegedly got out of control at the debut of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps in 1913, and at George Antheil’s Ballets suédois performance in 1923. (The latter tumult was even captured on film by Marcel L’Herbier, who may have actually incited the riot to create an appropriate scene for his movie L’Inhumaine.) Our schemas of music genre and social stratification would separate works such as “Funky Butt” and Le sacre du printemps into separate spheres, lowbrow and highbrow, that in theory have nothing to do with each other, but in practice, the zeal for subversion and transgression in twentieth-century culture would recognize no boundaries and cut across all traditional class lines. In a later chapter, we will look at the striking connections between rock performances and acts of ritual violence, yet even here, in the midst of the classical music world of the early twentieth century, we already see anticipations of Altamont and the Sex Pistols’ final concert at Winterland. Composers are increasingly viewed as provocateurs, and their music is now expected to disrupt and agitate.

从另一个角度来看，二十世纪古典音乐的创新者与拉格泰姆、爵士乐和布鲁斯的创始人有着惊人的相似之处。我们已经强调过侨民在创造新的音乐表达形式中的重要性，但之前我们关注的是黑人侨民——尤其是非洲奴隶后裔对现代流行音乐的巨大影响。然而，在古典音乐领域，政治流亡者和移民也引领了本世纪最进步的运动。维也纳人阿诺德·勋伯格在纳粹兴起后不得不移居加利福尼亚。出生于俄罗斯的伊戈尔·斯特拉文斯基一生大部分时间在瑞士、法国和美国度过，他在洛杉矶居住的时间比在其他任何城市都要长。保罗·兴德米特也曾移居美国，库尔特·威尔、谢尔盖·拉赫玛尼诺夫、贝拉·巴托克、埃里希·沃尔夫冈·科恩戈尔德、欧内斯特·布洛赫等等也都曾移居美国。每个人的情况各不相同，有时促使他们移居的并非家乡的政治压迫，而是新地方的更好机会。但我们最好从更广阔的视角来看待这些迁徙，并牢记外来者在古典音乐中始终扮演着重要角色——要证明这一点，你只需……想想亨德尔和海顿在英国的受欢迎程度，肖邦和李斯特在巴黎的成功，以及许多其他巡回演出或移居国外的艺术家。或许有一天，一位学者会对西方音乐厅传统的杰作进行统计分析，确定有多少比例是在作曲家故乡之外创作或首演的——这无疑将占古典曲目的很大一部分。在二十世纪，这些身处异乡的陌生人获得了特殊的影响力，并提醒我们，无论是在学术音乐系和音乐厅，还是在爵士夜总会和蓝调酒吧，局外人的神秘感都同样强烈。

In still another way, the classical music innovators of the twentieth century reveal a surprising resemblance to the originators of ragtime, jazz, and blues. We have already highlighted the importance of diaspora in the creation of new forms of musical expression, but previously we focused on the black diaspora—and in particular, on the supersized influence the descendants of African slaves exerted on modern popular music. Yet in classical music as well, political exiles and émigrés spearheaded the most progressive movements of the century. Arnold Schoenberg, a Vienna native, had to resettle in California after the rise of Nazism. Russian-born Igor Stravinsky spent most of his life in Switzerland, France, and the United States, and resided in Los Angeles for a longer period than in any other city. Paul Hindemith also relocated to the United States, as did Kurt Weill, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Béla Bartók, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernest Bloch, and many others. The circumstances varied in each case, and sometimes better opportunities in a new locale, rather than political oppression at home, motivated a move. But we do well to consider these migrations in a larger context, recalling that outsiders have always played a prominent role in classical music—for proof, you merely need to consider the popularity of Handel and Haydn in England, the successes of Chopin and Liszt in Paris, and the many other cases of itinerant or relocated artists. Perhaps someday, a scholar will undertake a statistical analysis of the masterworks of the Western concert hall tradition, and determine what percentage were composed or made their debut outside the geographical boundaries of the composer’s native land—it will certainly represent a significant portion of the classical repertoire. In the twentieth century, these strangers in a strange land gained special influence, and remind us that the mystique of the outsider is just as great whether we are considering academic music departments and concert halls or jazz nightclubs and blues juke joints.

然而，从另一个角度来看，现代主义古典音乐与这些流行语汇截然不同：即其通往受人尊敬的道路。所有成功的音乐圈外人士最终都会获得受人尊敬的圈内人士的光环，但就二十世纪的古典音乐创新者而言，即使其作曲技巧尚未真正成为主流，这种情况也可能发生。在阿诺德·勋伯格及其追随者的十二音阶音乐中，或各种作曲家对微音技巧的实验中，甚至在约翰·凯奇的彻底沉默中，我们都看到了一些非常不同寻常的事情：这些运动往往通过学术机构和资助机构的介入而获得赞誉和合法化，而从未跨越到更广泛的文化领域。黑人音乐创新以截然不同的方式获得尊重——尤其是通过销售唱片、吸引粉丝，以及被各种商业利益集团模仿（并经常被剽窃）。在这两种情况下，超越传统的创新者最终都会被接受，成为受人尊敬的文化英雄，而每个颠覆性运动及其领导者都获得了尊重和偶像地位，但他们在这段旅程中所走的道路却截然不同。

Yet in another regard, modernist classical music diverged sharply from these popular idioms: namely, in its pathway to respectability. All successful outsiders in music eventually gain the luster of esteemed insiders, but in the case of classical music innovators of the twentieth century, this could now happen without any real mainstreaming of the compositional techniques involved. In the twelve-tone row music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, or the experiments of various composers with microtonal techniques, or even the radical silence of John Cage, we encounter something very unusual: movements gain acclaim and legitimization, often through the intervention of academic and grant-giving institutions, without ever crossing over into the broader culture. Black musical innovations gain respect in very different ways—notably by selling records, attracting fans, and getting imitated (and frequently ripped off) by various commercial interests. In both cases, the transgressive innovator eventually finds acceptance as an admired cultural hero, and each subversive movement and their leaders secure respectability and iconic status, but the paths they take on this journey could hardly be more different.

二十世纪下半叶普利策音乐奖的获奖者们体现了古典音乐的模式：试着在众多作品中找出最热门的唱片。它并不在那里，而且绝非偶然。与以往任何一代人相比，这些作曲家都更能抵制同化。这是一种新的东西。莫扎特和海顿深受大众喜爱。即使是贝多芬、肖邦和柴可夫斯基等浪漫主义的狂热分子，他们的音乐语汇最终也被流行文化所取代，有时他们的旋律会被无情地盗用，重新包装成电台热门歌曲。但阿诺德·勋伯格、阿尔班·贝尔格、安东·韦伯恩以及二战后绝大多数其他学院派作曲家永远不会发生这种情况。或许这代表着颠覆的顶峰——还有什么比一种永远无法被同化的创新更激进呢？又或许，这是西方精英音乐中某种“历史的终结”时刻。

The winners of the Pulitzer Prize in music during the second half of the twentieth century exemplify the classical model: try to find the hit record in the bunch. It’s not there, and hardly by chance. More than any previous generation, these composers resisted assimilation. This is something new. Mozart and Haydn were crowd-pleasers. Even the fierce spirits of Romanticism, such as Beethoven, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky, eventually had their musical vocabulary taken over by pop culture, and sometimes their melodies have been ruthlessly pilfered and repackaged as radio hits. But that will never happen with Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and the vast majority of other academic composers of the post–World War II years. Perhaps this represents the height of subversion—What could be more radical than an innovation that can never be assimilated? Or perhaps it’s a kind of “end of history” moment in elite Western music.

历史的尽头会发生什么？正如弗里德里希·尼采以其永恒轮回理论告诫我们的那样，我们别无选择，只能回到起点。迁移、轮回、重生——在我们努力应对动荡的二十世纪古典音乐的颠覆性潮流时，这三种力量似乎处处与我们交锋。奥利维尔·梅西安在其影响深远的二十世纪中期，继其在纳粹战俘营中首次演出的开创性作品《时间终结四重奏》（Quatuor pour la fin du temps）之后，又创作了以鸟鸣为灵感的作品，而根据达尔文的说法，鸟鸣是所有音乐的起点。这种从终点到起点的转变推动了这个时代，尤其是在二十世纪下半叶，许多最具煽动性的音乐项目应运而生。 （这不仅仅局限于古典音乐：说唱不就是单声部吟唱纯粹表达力的复活吗？EDM 驱动的锐舞不就是回归史前时期那些令人着迷的仪式吗？）在这种情况下，永恒的轮回常常要求人们向非洲致敬——非洲被公认为人类迁徙的最终源头，并被神话为根源音乐的最终根源——它的贡献如今已深深植根于音乐会音乐的 DNA 中，丝毫不逊于流行音乐。在这里，黑人音乐和白人音乐的叙事再次交汇，即使在一个以非同寻常的措施将这两个领域隔离开来、互不接触的社会文化背景下。

What happens at the end of history? Well, as Friedrich Nietzsche would admonish us, with his theory of eternal recurrence, we have no choice but to return to the beginning. Relocation, recurrence, rebirth—these three forces seem to confront us at every turn as we grapple with the disruptive currents of classical music during the tumultuous twentieth century. It’s all too fitting that, at almost its midpoint, Olivier Messiaen followed up his seminal Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the end of time), first performed at a Nazi prison camp where the composer was in captivity, with works inspired by birdsong, the starting point for all music, according to Darwin. This shift from ends to beginnings propels many of the most provocative musical projects of this era, especially during the second half of the twentieth century. (And not just classical music: What is rap but a resurrection of the pure expressivity of monophonic chant? What is the EDM-driven rave but a return to the trance-inspiring rituals of prehistory?) And in such instances, the eternal recurrence frequently demands homage to Africa—acknowledged as the ultimate source of human migrations and mythologized as the ultimate root of roots music—whose contributions are now embedded in the DNA of concert music no less than of pop. Here, again, the narratives of black and white music converge, even in a sociocultural context marked by extraordinary measures to keep these two spheres separate and incommunicado.

当我们把注意力转向现代主义议程的早期杰作时，非洲元素和重生的象征和复发已经引起我们的注意。20 世纪 20 年代初，达律斯·米约根据非洲民间传说创作了《创造世界》 （1923 年）——它的名字（字面意思是“创造世界”）本身就标志着对最初前提的回归。这部非凡的作品在格什温杰作首演的伊奥利亚音乐厅音乐会两年前就以不可思议的程度预示了《蓝色狂想曲》 。甚至更早，在《春之祭》（1913 年）中，斯特拉文斯基基于对古代祭祀和生育仪式的唤起建立了他的现代主义声音结构。乔治·安塞尔演奏了他的《野性奏鸣曲》（1922 年）和《爵士交响曲》（1925 年），而当时欧洲对爵士乐的兴趣已经渗透了原始主义和高贵野蛮人的奇怪观念。这些概念随着岁月的流逝而逐渐消逝，事实上，这些作品中非洲和世界音乐的元素常常被汹涌澎湃的欧洲实验主义潮流所淹没。当时层级分明的音乐界距离真正实现不同文化之间平等对话仍有一段距离。但从意识形态的角度来看，议程早已在早期阶段为我们准备好了。我们清晰地见证了泛全球化方法的初露端倪，这种方法在近几十年来已成为所有音乐（无论高雅还是低俗）的主流。或许，我们只需要走到历史的尽头——或者至少是传统调性的尽头——我们就能以它们自己的方式接受这些传统。

When we turn our attention to the early masterworks of modernist agenda, both this African element and symbols of rebirth and recurrence already demand our attention. At the dawn of the 1920s, Darius Milhaud crafted his La création du monde (1923)—its very name (literally “the creation of the world”) signals a return to first premises—on the basis of African folklore. This remarkable work anticipated Rhapsody in Blue to an uncanny degree two years before the Aeolian Hall concert that marked the debut of Gershwin’s masterwork. Even earlier, in Le sacre du printemps (1913), Stravinksy built his modernist sound structures on evocations of ancient sacrificial and fertility rites. George Antheil served up his Sonata Sauvage (1922) and A Jazz Symphony (1925) at a time when European interest in jazz had become permeated with odd notions of primitivism and noble savages. These concepts haven’t worn well with the passing years, and in truth, the African and world music ingredients in these works were often overwhelmed by the onrushing currents of European experimentalism. The stratified music scene was still some distance away from a real dialogue between cultures in which both could be on an equal footing. But from an ideological standpoint, the agenda has already been laid out for our inspection at this early stage. We are clearly witnessing the first stirrings of the pan-global approach that has come to the forefront of all music, highbrow or lowbrow, in recent decades. Perhaps we just needed to reach the end of history—or at least conventional tonality—before we could accept these traditions on their own terms.

当这种更具活力的对话终于开始，非洲化的音乐结构几乎平等地与西方古典音乐中的欧洲元素融合时，转折点要求反叛需要一个新名称和新的议程。它以极简主义的名义出现，以史蒂夫·莱奇、菲利普·格拉斯、特里·莱利和拉蒙特·杨在20世纪60年代和70年代的崛起为标志。这些新的反叛者不仅借鉴了重要的非西方传统，还在前瞻性的古典音乐和大众流行文化之间建立了一个动态的接触点——在经历了一段几乎完全孤立的漫长时期后，他们终于再次对话。听众不需要参加音乐欣赏课程，就能追溯这些极简主义作曲家与新浪潮潮流之间的影响。摇滚、放克、爵士和迪斯科。这些音乐以其持续的脉动和即兴的节奏模式，在音乐中跃然纸上，吸引着人们。如今，这些元素似乎既适合舞厅，也适合音乐厅。在20世纪70年代初，菲利普·格拉斯或许会被贴上古典作曲家的标签，而布莱恩·伊诺则被贴上摇滚音乐家的标签，但这种差异恰恰凸显了这些标签的误导性。他们都参与了时代思潮的浪潮。特里·莱利的专辑被摆放在唱片店的古典音乐区，但任何真正听过他作品的人，都能听到从南亚音乐到DJ风格的磁带循环的各种元素。这种音乐无法被归类。更重要的是，极简主义代表着一种重要的回归，回归到早于西方古典作曲事业的音乐价值观，并以对节奏和恍惚音乐的民粹式颂扬而脱颖而出。我们再次回到了流散黑人和黑人底层阶级的境遇，无论是在音乐厅，还是在点唱机上。特里·莱利（Terry Riley）能够以一位出色的爵士钢琴家谋生，菲利普·格拉斯乐团（Philip Glass Ensemble）刻意模仿艾灵顿公爵（Duke Ellington）的乐队，拉·蒙特·杨（La Monte Young）通过与洛杉矶爵士乐手合作开启了他的音乐生涯，史蒂夫·莱奇（Steve Reich）认为约翰·柯川（John Coltrane）的《非洲/铜管乐》（Africa/Brass）专辑对他产生了重大影响，这些都绝非巧合。尽管这些音乐承诺——并且经常带来——新鲜而新颖的声音，但古老的辩证法依然存在：局外人（在很多情况下，非洲人或非裔美国人）的声音景观为交响乐厅和歌剧院中被认可和合法化的音乐奠定了基础。

When that more vibrant dialogue finally started to take place, with Africanized musical structures mixing on almost equal terms with European elements in Western classical music, the turning point demanded both a new name and a new agenda of rebellion. It arrived on the scene in the guise of minimalism, marked by the ascendancy of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young in the 1960s and 1970s. These new rebels not only drew on vital non-Western traditions, but also forged a dynamic point of contact between forward-looking classical music and mass-market popular culture—finally on speaking terms again after a long period of almost total isolation. Listeners didn’t need to take a music appreciation class in order to trace lines of influence between these minimalist composers and the trendy currents in New Wave rock, funk, jazz, and disco. It jumped out at them in the music, with its insistent pulsations and vamp-styled patterns, ingredients that now seemed just as suitable for the dance hall as the concert hall. In the early 1970s, Philip Glass might have been labeled a classical composer and Brian Eno a rock musician, but that discrepancy simply pointed out how misleading such labels could be. They both participated in the zeitgeist. Terry Riley’s albums were kept in the classical music section of the record store, but anyone who actually listened to his oeuvre heard everything from South Asian influences to DJ-style tape loops. This music just couldn’t be pigeonholed. More to the point, minimalism represented a vital return to the musical values that predate the whole enterprise of Western classical composition, standing out with a populist celebration of rhythm and trance. And again we find our way back to the diaspora and the black underclass, here in the concert hall just as on the jukebox. It’s hardly a coincidence that Terry Riley could have made a living as a badass jazz pianist, or that the Philip Glass Ensemble deliberately emulated Duke Ellington’s band, or that La Monte Young initiated his music career by playing with Los Angeles jazz musicians, or that Steve Reich cited John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass album as a significant influence. Even as this music promised—and often delivered—sounds that were fresh and new, the old dialectic reasserted itself: the soundscape of the outsider (as in so many instances, African or African American) laying the groundwork for what would turn into the sanctioned, legitimized music of the symphony hall and opera house.

事实上，二十世纪后期音乐的彻底重组几乎总是需要，至少在某种程度上，非洲或非裔美国人的创造力注入——即使是实验电子音乐，乍一看似乎不受国家和种族标记的影响。这些新的高科技声音可能起源于研究实验室和学术环境，但很快，关键的创新就来自放克、爵士和灵魂乐艺术家以及具有前瞻性的DJ。Minimoog合成器上市仅几个月后，这种令人兴奋的新黑人氛围便出现在Sun Ra的《My Brother the Wind》（1970）、Isaac海耶斯为《黑街神探》（ Shaft，1971）创作的配乐，以及史蒂夫·旺德（Stevie Wonder）的《有声书》（Talking Book，1972）的配乐。这或许是精英阶层被同化的一个领域，这让他们感到懊恼。卡尔海因茨·施托克豪森（Karlheinz Stockhausen，1928-2007）是将电子声音融入古典音乐的先驱，他的创新在当今的舞曲、氛围音景以及各种各样不计其数的休闲音乐流派中回荡。施托克豪森的继承者从Aphex Twin到弗兰克·扎帕，全面评估他对商业音乐的影响，涵盖了披头士、比约克、大卫·鲍伊、迈尔斯·戴维斯、平克·弗洛伊德和傻朋克等形形色色的人物。在20世纪90年代的一次采访中，当被问及他对其中一些艺术家的影响时，斯托克豪森抱怨他的追随者们“后非洲式的重复”，并抱怨那些试图在“舞厅或其他任何地方”制造特殊效果的音乐家。但为时已晚；古典音乐界在这件事上被忽视了。即使一些电子音乐创新者鄙视跨界音乐的成功，其他人也会将他们的标志性声音带给大众^。7

In truth, radical realignments of music during the late twentieth century almost always required, at least in some degree, an African or African American infusion of creativity—even experimental electronic music, which at first glance seems perhaps immune to national and racial markers. These new high-tech sounds may have originated in research laboratories and academic settings, but soon the key innovations were coming from funk, jazz, and soul artists and forward-looking DJs. Only a few months after the Minimoog synthesizer came to market, this exciting new black vibe could be heard on projects such Sun Ra’s My Brother the Wind (1970), Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack to Shaft (1971), and Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book (1972). Here was one area in which elitists did get assimilated, perhaps to their chagrin. The innovations of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), a pioneer in integrating electronic sounds into classical compositions, reverberate in current-day dance music, ambient soundscapes, and the various chill-out genres whose names are legion. Stockhausen’s heirs range from Aphex Twin to Frank Zappa, and a full assessment of his influence on commercial music would encompass such disparate figures as the Beatles, Björk, David Bowie, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, and Daft Punk. When reminded of his influence on some of these artists in a 1990s interview, Stockhausen complained about his acolytes’ “post-African repetitions,” and griped about musicians who aimed at achieving a “special effect in dancing bars, or wherever it is.” But it was too late; the classical music establishment had been bypassed in this matter. Even if some electronic music innovators disdained crossover success, others would bring their trademark sounds to the masses.⁷

尽管我对这些音乐界的先驱们怀有敬意，但我必须指出，早在斯托克豪森襁褓之时，爵士乐手们就已经开始尝试电子乐器，尤其是颤音琴和电吉他。如今，这些乐器已被视为主流音乐的日常组成部分，但在莱昂内尔·汉普顿于1930年开始演奏颤音琴，或查理·克里斯蒂安于1939年与本尼·古德曼六重奏乐队合作录制电吉他专辑时，它们还只是些新鲜玩意儿。在这种情况下，黑人爵士乐手们充当了白人技术专家创新的合法化者，这与他们的传统角色形成了鲜明对比——但很快，它们就成为了新音乐设备的标准操作程序。

With all due respect to these musical agitators, I must point out that jazz musicians had been experimenting with electric instruments, specifically the vibraphone and electric guitar, back when Stockhausen was still in swaddling clothes. Today, these instruments are considered everyday ingredients of mainstream music, but they were little more than novelties when Lionel Hampton started playing the vibraphone in 1930 or Charlie Christian recorded on electric guitar with the Benny Goodman Sextet in 1939. In this instance, black jazz musicians served as the legitimizers for the innovations of white technologists, an odd reversal of their traditional role—but soon to become standard operating procedure for new music gear.

爵士乐队领队雷蒙德·斯科特是一位风格独特的作曲家，他的作品以动画片配乐而闻名。1946年，他创立了一家科技公司，致力于打造新的电子音乐系统。他这一时期的作品预示了具象音乐运动的关键元素，该运动在二战后法国也秉持着类似的美学理念。然而，斯科特在晚年却被遗忘，直到今天才开始获得应有的重视。事实上，他应该为此承担大部分责任。这位创新者对保密的痴迷近乎偏执。在稍微不同的情况下，他的 Electronium（一种合成器和算法作曲工具的组合）可能会取代 Moog 并改变流行音乐的进程。但即使是现在，在 1994 年斯科特去世很久之后，这项技术的具体细节仍然是个秘密。尽管有这些自我强加的障碍，但他与不同的流行文化机构的合作，从摩城唱片公司（购买了一台 Electronium 甚至聘请斯科特担任技术专家）到布偶，都清楚地表明，他的创新有可能走出学术界和研究机构，进入主流。

Jazz bandleader Raymond Scott, a quirky composer whose works became best known as cartoon soundtracks, set up a tech company to create new electronic music systems in 1946, and his work from this period anticipates key elements of the musique concrète movement, which embraced a similar aesthetic in France during the post–World War II era. Yet Scott was a forgotten figure in his later years, and even today has only started to receive his due. In truth, he bears much of the blame for this. This innovator worked with an obsession for secrecy that bordered on paranoia. Under slightly different circumstances, his Electronium, a combined synthesizer and algorithmic composition tool, might have displaced the Moog and shaped the course of popular music. But even now, long after Scott’s death in 1994, the specifics of the technology are still very much a secret. Despite these self-imposed obstacles, his collaborations with disparate pop culture institutions, ranging from the Motown record label (which purchased an Electronium and even hired Scott as a technologist) to the Muppets, make clear that his innovations had the potential to move outside of academia and research facilities and enter the mainstream.

同样的传播路径在音乐技术的每一次后续创新中都得以重现，从爵士摇滚融合运动的插电式乐器，到如今最新的数字音乐工具。从爵士乐到嘻哈音乐，以及介于两者之间的所有音乐类型，商业音乐人都已成为主流化的力量，并为他人的创新提供认可。2011年，硅谷半导体巨头英特尔聘请黑眼豆豆乐队成员will.i.am担任“创意创新总监”，当时许多观察家都想知道，一位说唱歌手兼DJ究竟能在推进科技驱动的议程中扮演怎样的角色。但正如我们在汉普顿和克里斯蒂安身上所见，这种共生关系已经持续了数十年，任何一部真正的现代文化科技史都必须涵盖迈尔斯·戴维斯、桑·拉和闪电大师等风格迥异的人物——尽管他们都没有获得过STEM学位。局外人成为了通往合法化的另一条途径的源泉。

This same path of dissemination has been repeated with every subsequent innovation in music technology, from the plugged-in instruments of the jazz-rock fusion movement to the most up-to-date digital music tools of the current day. Commercial musicians, from jazz to hip-hop and all points in between, have turned into forces of mainstreaming and validation for the innovations of others. When Intel, the semiconductor powerhouse of Silicon Valley, hired will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas as its “Director of Creative Innovation” in 2011, many observers wondered what possible role a rapper and DJ could play in advancing a tech-driven agenda. But as we have already seen with Hampton and Christian, this kind of symbiosis has been going on for decades now, and any real history of technology in modern culture would have to address figures as disparate as Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Grandmaster Flash—although none of them ever earned a STEM degree. The outsider becomes the source of a different pathway to legitimization.

乍一看，这种趋势似乎代表着数千年音乐史的彻底逆转。然而，即使外来者在二十世纪获得了某种社会力量——称之为“酷”、“嘻哈”或“街头信誉”——他们仍然在一个由他人控制和塑造的更大的社会经济背景中运作。这种情况在现代音乐中创造了一种独特的张力，我们将在不同的时代和地点看到它的具体体现。在本书的最后几章中。结果，机构和守门人对于在特定环境中应该包含什么或排除什么产生了越来越多的冲突。

At first glance, this trend seems to represent a total reversal of thousands of years of music history. But even as outsiders gained a certain kind of social power during the course of the twentieth century—call it coolness or hipness or street cred—they still operate within a larger socioeconomic context controlled and shaped by others. This situation creates a distinctive tension in modern music, which we will see manifested at different times and places in the closing chapters of this book. As a result, institutions and gatekeepers are increasingly conflicted over what gets included or excluded from any given setting.

在我们迄今为止对二十世纪音乐的叙述中，白人音乐的境遇并不理想——至少在那些能够自给自足、从打破常规的创新过渡到被主流流行文化接受的先驱者中，白人音乐的境遇并不理想。而当我们遇到像乔治·格什温或本尼·古德曼这样富有远见的人物时，我们常常发现他们明确地从黑人群体中汲取灵感。但现代音乐史提供了一个巨大的例外，我们现在就需要正视它。我们必须与乡村音乐进行探讨，近一个世纪以来，乡村音乐一直是美国最受欢迎的音乐类型之一，并且早已以其魅力风靡全球。我仍然记得年轻时获得的奖学金让我能够离开童年时期的喧嚣街区，前往遥远的英国牛津大学学习时的震惊。在这里，我忐忑不安地适应着一个与我的美国血统截然不同的世界和文化，但有一件事却出乎我的意料：即使在牛津，我也一遍又一遍地听乡村音乐，发现它拥有与这个精英环境格格不入的追随者和受欢迎程度。这是一个意想不到的成功故事，尤其是考虑到定义这一音乐类型的乡村牛仔生活方式即使在美国也几乎消失了，使得乡村音乐在其发源地成为一种时代错误。那时，我沉浸在我挚爱的爵士乐中，弹钢琴来补贴奖学金。我憎恨这种来自国外的竞争音乐，它远不如我所钟爱的那些更激进、更具颠覆性的音乐那么正宗，至少我是这样认为的。但如今，我对这种区分音乐流派的方式已经不那么确定了。

So far in our narrative of twentieth-century music, white folks haven’t fared too well—at least not as self-sufficient pioneers who can make the transition from outside-the-box innovation to mainstream pop culture acceptance. And when we have encountered a visionary figure of this sort, such as George Gershwin or Benny Goodman, we’ve often found them drawing explicitly upon sources of inspiration from the black community. But modern music history offers one huge exception, and we need to address it now. We must wrangle with country music, which for almost a century has consistently ranked among the most popular genres in the United States, and long ago went global in its appeal. I still recall my shock as a young man, when a scholarship allowed me to leave behind the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of my youth and study at Oxford University in faraway England. Here I uneasily adapted to a world and culture completely different from my American origins, but one thing was the same, very much to my surprise: even at Oxford, I heard country music—over and over again—and found it possessed a following and popularity that seemed incongruous in this elite setting. This was an unlikely success story, especially when I considered that the rural cowboy lifestyles that had defined this genre had almost disappeared even within the United States, making country a kind of anachronism in its country of origin. At that point in my life, I was immersed in my beloved jazz music, and playing piano to supplement my scholarship funds. I resented this rival export, which was hardly as authentic, or so I thought, as the more radical and disruptive music I favored. But nowadays, I’m not so sure about that way of differentiating music genres.

从另一个角度来看，乡村音乐并非我们所追溯的黑人音乐演变过程的例外。事实上，南方黑人和白人的本土音乐风格从未像公众形象所暗示的那样相差甚远。蓝草班卓琴音乐或许可以被称为终极乡村音乐是乡村音乐的典型代表（好莱坞当然这么认为——只要听听《激流四勇士》或《贝弗利山人》的配乐就知道了），但它的切分音通常与拉格泰姆音乐相同。乡村歌手像布鲁斯歌手一样压调音符，甚至可以在标准的十二小节曲式中游刃有余。1930 年，乡村音乐明星吉米·罗杰斯与路易斯·阿姆斯特朗合作录制了一首开创性的歌曲，无视主流社会的种族隔离方式，敏锐的耳朵听不出任何流派冲突。但更重要的是，如果我需要一个结论性论据来证明我的论点，即音乐创新不可避免地来自外来者和边缘化群体，那么这种乡村音乐类型就是最好的证明。否则，我们如何解释这种特殊情况，即使是白人文化也需要转向其最贫困的社区和被鄙视的公民来寻找其标志性的声音？纽约、洛杉矶和芝加哥再次未能做到这一点。所谓的乡巴佬、牧牛人和私酒贩子比哈佛和耶鲁的毕业生更受欢迎。再一次，要想走上高位，第一步就是走下坡路。

From another perspective, country music isn’t an exception at all from the processes we have traced in the evolution of black music. In truth, the vernacular black and white music styles of the South were never as far apart as their public images might suggest. Bluegrass banjo music may be branded as the ultimate hillbilly music (Hollywood certainly thinks so—just check out the soundtracks to Deliverance or The Beverly Hillbillies), but its syncopations are often identical to those found in ragtime. Country singers bend their notes just like the blues singers, and can even operate comfortably within the standard twelve-bar form. When the country star Jimmie Rodgers recorded with Louis Armstrong on a seminal track back in 1930, ignoring the segregated ways of mainstream society, no genre clash could be detected by discerning ears. But more to the point, if I needed a closing argument to prove my contention that music innovation inevitably comes from outsiders and marginalized communities, this down-home genre provides the clincher. How else can we explain the peculiar circumstance that even white culture needed to turn to its most impoverished communities and despised citizenry to find its emblematic sound? Here again, New York and Los Angeles and Chicago fell short. So-called hillbillies, cattle wranglers, and moonshiners took precedence over Harvard and Yale graduates. Once again, to go high, the first step was to go low.

乡村音乐和布鲁斯音乐的起源如此相似，以至于很难说是巧合。它们几乎诞生于同一历史时刻，而且大多都诞生于同样穷困潦倒的地区。在很多情况下，它们早期那些具有历史意义的唱片都是由同一批唱片制作人制作的——例如，拉尔夫·皮尔（Ralph Peer）监督了玛米·史密斯（Mamie Smith）的《疯狂布鲁斯》（Crazy Blues）的录制，这首一鸣惊人的热门歌曲奠定了布鲁斯音乐的市场地位；之后，他又组织了布里斯托尔的录制工作，布里斯托尔常被誉为“乡村音乐的诞生地”，开启了吉米·罗杰斯（Jimmie Rodgers）和卡特家族（Carter Family）的职业生涯。对于这两种音乐类型，唱片公司都必须组织前往南方的实地考察才能找到他们最大的明星，这对于大城市的音乐巨头来说是一个羞辱的承认，因为他们认为应该由有抱负的艺术家亲自前往他们那里，而不是反过来。

Country music and blues share so many similarities in their origins, to an extent that can hardly be mere coincidence. They emerged at almost the same historical moment, and for the most part in the same down-and-out locales. In many instances, the very same record producers were responsible for their history-making early recordings—take, for example, Ralph Peer, who supervised the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” the breakout hit that established the market for blues, and then organized the Bristol sessions, often praised as the “birthplace of country music,” launching the careers of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. For both genres, record labels had to mount field trips to the South to find their biggest stars, a humiliating admission for big-city music moguls who liked to think that aspiring artists should make the journey to them, not the other way around.

想想更奇怪的情况，吉米·罗杰斯和罗伯特·约翰逊，分别是早期乡村音乐和早期布鲁斯音乐的标志性人物，来到密西西比州杰克逊的同一家零售店参加试镜正是同一个人，HC Speir。Speir 是当时音乐界最卑微的星探，一个小镇的星探，在法里什街零售店的后屋里试镜不知名的模仿者，偶尔会把更有前途的歌手推荐给唱片业的高层。令他后来懊恼的是，Speir 没有选择 Rodgers，而是让他回密西西比州的默里迪恩继续创作歌曲。但他确实给了 Johnson 点头，并帮助这位蓝调传奇人物开启了职业生涯。然而，这两位定义音乐流派的明星在大萧条时期来到美国最贫穷的州，同一个黑人社区的同一个简陋住所，走上截然不同的震撼世界的人生轨迹，这其中的概率有多大呢？

And consider the even odder conjunction of circumstances that brought both Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson, the most iconic figures in early country music and early blues, respectively, into the exact same retail store in Jackson, Mississippi, to audition for the exact same person, H. C. Speir. Speir was the lowliest talent scout you could find in the music world of his day, a small-town operator who tried out unknown wannabes in the back room of his Farish Street retail store, and occasionally referred the more promising singers to those higher up the food chain in the record industry. To his later chagrin, Speir passed on Rodgers and told him to go back to Meridian, Mississippi, and work on his songwriting. But he did give the nod to Johnson, and helped launch the blues legend’s career. Yet what are the odds against these two genre-defining stars arriving at the same humble address in the same black neighborhood in the poorest state in the country during the Great Depression on their very different world-shaking trajectories?

不，这不可能是巧合，但尽管可能性微乎其微，我们却能从某种统计数字中发现音乐创新的棘手本质。即使在现代尖端科技催生出强大的全球音乐产业之后，旧有的格局依然存在。业内人士或许能够掌控商业的车轮，但他们别无选择，只能依靠外来者——而且是一次又一次地——来维持运转。

No, this can’t be coincidence, but in its very unlikelihood we find a kind of statistical proof of the troublesome nature of musical innovation. Even after the rise of a powerful, global music industry built on the whiz-bang technologies of the modern era, the old dynamic was still in place. The insiders might very well run the wheels of commerce, but they had no choice but to rely on outsiders—and to do so over and over again—to keep them turning.

24

24

新石器时代乡村音乐的起源

The Origins of Country Music in the Neolithic Era

很多年前，我在研究游牧社会的音乐时，发现了一个令人费解的模式。彼此之间没有直接接触的文化，却拥有惊人相似的音乐实践和价值观。我能从他们的歌曲风格、乐器选择，甚至对音乐在日常生活中的作用的态度中，感受到这种相似。我刚刚完成了一项关于狩猎经济体及其歌曲的全面调查，这种对比几乎无与伦比。世界各地的游牧社会都放弃了狩猎祖先的音乐实践，选择了一套完全不同的技巧和表达平台。这仅仅是巧合吗？还是新石器时代从狩猎到游牧的转变从根本上改变了音乐实践——或许至今仍以某种方式影响着我们的歌曲？

Many years ago, I noticed a puzzling pattern in my research into the music of herding societies. Cultures with no direct contact with each other had embraced strikingly similar musical practices and values. I could hear it in the style of their songs, in their choice of instruments, even in their attitudes about the role of music in everyday life. I had just completed a comprehensive survey of hunting economies and their songs, and the contrast could hardly have been more sharply delineated. Herding communities in every part of the world had renounced the musical practices of their hunting ancestors and opted for a completely different body of techniques and platforms for expression. Was this just happenstance, or did the shift from hunting to herding in the Neolithic age fundamentally change musical practices—perhaps in ways that still impact our songs today?

为了寻求指导，我联系了一位曾在当代游牧社区进行过田野调查的著名民族音乐学家，并向他寻求答案。他是如何解释这些相似之处的？以及融合？他曾在这些牧民村落中待过相当长一段时间，拥有我所缺乏的第一手资料。在这些社会中，他认为生计与音乐之间有何联系？

Seeking guidance, I contacted a leading ethnomusicologist who had undertaken fieldwork in a current-day herding community and pressed him for answers. How did he account for these similarities and convergences? He had spent a considerable amount of time in one of these herding villages and had firsthand knowledge I lacked. What did he see as the connection between livelihood and music in these societies?

他非但没有回答我的问题，反而显得有些恼火。他指出，不同的音乐文化独一无二，无法比较，而我所追求的那种概括并没有尊重这一事实。用世界各地不同背景和社群中的另一个人来解释一个人的歌曲，是一种危险的方法，应该被阻止。

Rather than answering my question, he showed some irritation at it. Musical cultures were unique and incommensurable, he indicated, and generalizations of the sort I was pursuing failed to respect this fact. To explain one person’s song by looking at another individual across the world in a different context and community was a dangerous methodology, and ought to be discouraged.

直到后来我才明白这次邂逅的讽刺意味，那时我得出结论，游牧社会音乐的相似之处与人无关。这在很大程度上是由动物决定的。世界各地的牧民都擅长演唱能安抚牲畜的歌曲。同样，他们也会避免演奏会让牲畜烦躁的音乐。即使在今天，我们仍然使用田园音乐（其词源告诉我们这是放牧音乐）来指代能唤起牧场景象的柔和、放松的声音，以及能唤起自然或乡村氛围的声音。这些环境中的音乐家不喜欢鼓，而是使用弦乐器和哀怨的管乐器，如排箫和笛子。这种音乐很少表现攻击性，更多的时候是平静和柔和的。这些表演者将这一传统传承给了后代，甚至传给了那些放弃放牧职业的人。如果没有牧羊人的传承，就不会有贝多芬的田园交响曲，或许也不会有乡村音乐。

The irony of this encounter only became apparent to me later, when I concluded that the similarities in the music of herding societies had nothing to do with people. It was determined, in large part, by the animals. Herders around the world had become adept at performing songs that soothed their livestock. By the same token, they avoided music that agitated the animals. Even today we use the term pastoral music—its etymology literally tells us that it is music for herding—to refer to gentle, relaxing sounds that summon up images of the pastures, soundscapes that evoke nature or rural settings. Musicians in these settings do not favor drums; instead, we find string instruments and plaintive wind instruments, such as panpipes and flutes. The music rarely channels aggression, but more often calms and subdues. These performers bequeathed that tradition to later generations, even those who abandoned the herding profession. Without the legacy of the shepherds, there would be no Pastoral Symphony from Beethoven, and perhaps no country music either.

一旦你理解了这一点，一切就变得显而易见了。许多原本难以解释的选择和传统顿时豁然开朗。然而，即使是深谙游牧民族音乐的专家，也可能无法理解这一点——如果他们的意识形态过于僵化，不愿放眼自身牧场之外。

Once you grasp this, it seems so obvious. And so many otherwise inexplicable choices and traditions are suddenly clarified. Yet even experts immersed in the music of the herding communities can fail to understand it—if their ideology is so rigid that they refuse to look beyond their own pasture.

狩猎社会对音乐的需求截然不同。如果叛逆历史学家约瑟夫·乔丹尼亚（Joseph Jordania）的说法正确（参见第二章），我们的狩猎祖先主要以食腐动物为生，依靠响亮喧闹的音乐来吓跑其他捕食者。他们的音乐更更自信、更具攻击性，更有可能依赖鼓和其他朗诵乐器。我们也继承了这些做法。说乡村歌手是牧民，摇滚明星是猎人，或许过于简单化了。但这里有一个值得承认的重要事实。几千年来，我们培育了两种截然不同的音乐文化。一种歌颂和解与乡村世界的定居生活，而另一种则陶醉于凶猛而充满激情的人类捕食者的游牧胜利。（在这种背景下，回想一下我们在开篇中认识到的，关于音乐起源的两种主流理论分别将音乐与爱和暴力联系起来——以及我们的结论，即这些假设可能并非互不相容，而是互为镜像，可以用美学和身体化学来解释。）

Hunting societies had very different musical needs. If renegade historian Joseph Jordania is correct (see Chapter 2), our hunting ancestors were primarily scavengers and relied on loud, boisterous music to scare away other predators. Their music is more assertive, more aggressive, more likely to rely on drums and other declamatory instruments. We have inherited these practices as well. It’s perhaps an oversimplification to say that country singers are herders, and rock stars are hunters. But there’s an important truth here that deserves recognition. We have nurtured two sharply contrasting musical cultures over thousands of years. One celebrates conciliation and the settled life of the rural world, while the other revels in the nomadic triumphs of the fierce and passionate human predator. (Recall, in this context, our recognition in the opening chapter that the two dominant theories for the origin of music link it, respectively, to love and violence—and our conclusion that these hypotheses may not be incompatible, but mirror images of each other, explicable both in terms of aesthetics and body chemistry.)

悠久畜牧历史中幸存的文献揭示了音乐对这种生活方式的巨大贡献，它不仅塑造了这种生活方式的情感结构，也支撑了其经济可行性。在不同的时代和地点，这些歌曲因其抚慰人心的旋律而脱颖而出。“牧羊人的笛子给牧场上的羊群带来安宁，”公元五世纪的罗马作家马克罗比乌斯宣称。历史学家埃马纽埃尔·勒鲁瓦·拉杜里在研究五百多年后的中世纪畜牧实践时指出：“笛子是每个牧羊人必备的装备，据说一个被毁掉的牧羊人甚至连笛子都没有了。” 近代，美国西部的牧民和牛仔早在这种声乐传统转变为音乐产业流派之前就学会了依靠舒缓的歌曲来控制牲畜^。1

Surviving documents from the long history of herding reveal how much music contributed to that way of life, not only shaping its emotional texture but also supporting its economic viability. In different times and places, these songs stood out for their comforting melodies. “Shepherd’s pipes bring rest to the flocks in the pasture,” announced Macrobius, a Roman writer of the fifth century. In his studies of medieval herding practices of more than five hundred years later, historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie notes that “a flute was a necessary part of every shepherd’s equipment, and of one who was ruined it was said that he no longer had even a flute.” In more recent times, cattle herders and cowboys in the American West learned to rely on soothing songs to control livestock long before this vocal tradition got turned into a music-industry genre.¹

在二十世纪，乡村音乐发展成为价值数十亿美元的产业，但牧民对击鼓的强烈敌意依然存在。多年来，纳什维尔的大奥普里剧院甚至颁布了一项正式规定，禁止在演出中使用鼓。在电吉他和摇滚乐登上这个古老的舞台很久之后，音乐家们仍然不得不争夺哪怕是一把简单的小军鼓。据说，为了保护观众（不，现在不是牛了）的敏感神经，鼓组不得不躲在幕布后面演奏。即使是超级明星也被迫改变他们的编曲，以取悦观众。他们挑剔的纳什维尔顾客。1955年，卡尔·珀金斯凭借《蓝色麂皮鞋》大获成功时，大奥普里剧院（Grand Ole Opry）毫不犹豫地推荐了这首充满活力的摇滚乐曲，前提是乐队的鼓手留在家中。乡村音乐最终与鼓乐和解，但即使在今天，如果你仔细聆听，你仍然会听到节奏吉他仍然在许多纳什维尔音乐中驱动着节奏，而鼓手则低调地在背景中演奏。正如一句古老的谚语所说，即使在牛回家很久之后，我们似乎仍然在根据牛的口味来调整我们的乡村音乐。

During the course of the twentieth century, country music grew into a multibillion-dollar business, but the herder’s marked animosity to drumming remained. For many years, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville went so far as to impose a formal rule prohibiting the use of drums in performance. Long after electric guitars and rock-influenced acts found their way onto this venerable stage, musicians still had to fight for even a simple snare drum, and stories are told of drum kits played behind curtains to protect the delicate sensibilities of (no, not the cattle now) the audience. Even superstars were forced to change their arrangements to please their persnickety Nashville patrons. When Carl Perkins enjoyed a huge hit with “Blue Suede Shoes” in 1955, the Grand Ole Opry had no qualms featuring this spirited rock ’n’ roll tune, provided the band’s drummer stayed at home. Country music eventually made its peace with the drums, but even today if you listen closely you will hear the rhythm guitar still driving the beat on many Nashville tunes while the drummer keeps a low profile in the background. Long after the cows have come home, to reverse an old proverb, we still seem to match our countrified music to their tastes.

乡村音乐的歌词似乎也源于新石器时代。乡村音乐依然秉承着人类社会随着耕作和放牧而诞生的定居生活精神——这与狩猎采集社会的游牧生活形成了鲜明对比。如果你想在饲养牲畜的同时种植作物，就不能走太远。或许正因如此，乡村歌曲仍然歌颂着一成不变的生活：坚持朝九晚五的工作，即使这份工作很烂；陪伴着你那一无是处的男友，即使他比你更糟糕。布鲁斯歌曲则不同。它们讲述的是流浪者搭乘下一班火车离开，躲避追踪他们的地狱猎犬，但那不是乡村音乐。在乡村音乐中，你忍受着，忍受着，付清了那辆凹陷的皮卡车的钱，然后回到你上周、上个月、去年去过的那家令人沮丧的酒吧。

Even the lyrics of country music seem to have their roots in the Neolithic period. Country music still adheres to the ethos of settled life that entered human society with cultivating and herding—in sharp contrast to the nomadic imperative of hunting and gathering societies. You couldn’t wander very far if you wanted to raise a crop while breeding livestock. Maybe that’s why country songs still celebrate static lives, sticking with your job 9-to-5, even if it’s lousy, and standing by your good-for-nothing man, even if he’s worse. Blues songs are different. They deal with ramblers leaving on the next train and evading the hellhound on their trail, but that’s not country music. In country, you endure and abide, make the payment on the dented pickup truck, and go back to that same sad bar you went to last week, last month, last year.

从宏观层面来看也是如此：乡村音乐最初获得商业成功，是因为那些拒绝迁入城市的人们偏爱这种音乐类型。20世纪，数千万美国人离开乡村生活，寻找新的机会，并准备摆脱他们出身的传统价值观。他们最终来到芝加哥、纽约、洛杉矶、底特律和其他繁华的城市中心。这些人从来都不是乡村音乐的核心受众。最终，人口结构的变化占据了主导地位，乡村音乐也开始城市化。但这并没有改变乡村音乐的本质，它仍然坚守着历史悠久的价值观，并对城市化趋势持怀疑态度。当卡特家族带着他们广受欢迎的乡村音乐巡回演出来到城里时，宣传海报上写道：“这场演出在道德上是好的”——这是一个承诺。自古以来，从未有任何一支著名的布鲁斯乐队创作过这样的作品。萨拉·卡特的演唱风格朴素，完全摒弃了贝西·史密斯或比莉·霍利戴那种性感的音色，强化了这一理念。买一张十美分的门票，把欲望抛在脑后。后来的乡村音乐明星在私人生活或公众形象上并不总是能达到这样的标准，但这种音乐类型与稳定、传统的生活方式之间的联系从未被完全切断。

That’s also true on the macro level: country first gained commercial success as the preferred music genre of those who refused to participate in the migration to the cities. Tens of millions of Americans left rural life behind during the course of the twentieth century, looking for new opportunities and ready to shed the traditional values of their origins. They ended up in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and other bustling urban centers. Those folks were never the core audience for country music. Eventually, demographics prevailed, and country music became citified. But that didn’t change the ethos of the genre, which still held fast to time-honored values and viewed urban trends with a large dose of skepticism. When the Carter Family brought their popular touring show of country music to town, the poster announcing their performances declared: “The Program is Morally Good”—a promise never made, since the beginning of time, by any famous blues band. The sober singing style of Sara Carter, purged entirely of the sensual sonorities of a Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, reinforced the message. Buy your ten-cent admission ticket, and leave your lust behind. Later country stars didn’t always live up to this standard in their private lives, or their public personas, for that matter, but the connection between this music genre and a settled, traditional way of life has never been completely sundered.

当今的乡村音乐与遥远过去的乡村民间音乐之间有着直接的历史渊源。英国民歌收藏家塞西尔·夏普来到美国阿巴拉契亚地区是有原因的。“这里的人非常有趣，他们的外貌、举止和谈吐都像英国农民，”他在1916年从北卡罗来纳州寄出的一封信中解释道。“他们的歌曲非常棒。我在这里只待了17天，就收集了90到100首歌曲。很多歌曲在英国早已销声匿迹。”十年后，音乐界的代表们为了寻找乡村音乐的录音明星，来到了同一地区。他们在这里找到的歌曲保留了一些旧世界牧歌最独特的元素^。2

A direct historical lineage can be constructed tracing today’s country music back to the rural folk music of the distant past. There’s a good reason why British folk song collector Cecil Sharp came to the Appalachian region of the United States. “The people are very interesting, just English peasants in appearance, manner and speech,” he explained in a 1916 letter from North Carolina. “Their songs are marvelous. I have only been here 17 days and I have collected between 90 and 100 songs. Many have long since become obsolete in England.” Representatives of the music industry journeyed to this same region a decade later in their search for country recording stars. And the songs they found here retained some of the most distinctive elements of Old World herding music.²

例如，约德尔调已被游牧社区使用了一千多年，既是召唤动物的方式，也是跨越牧场与附近村庄沟通的工具。它的声音迷人，在低沉的胸腔音调和高音或假声之间变换，但并非真正意义上的歌曲。然而，约德尔调几乎从一开始就出现在乡村音乐唱片中。我们在埃米特·米勒、莱利·帕克特，尤其是吉米·罗杰斯的唱片中都能听到它，他将其变成了自己朴实乡村风格的标志。据20世纪20年代在密西西比州演出的音乐家赫伯·奎因所说，“每个会弹吉他的人”很快就像吉米·罗杰斯一样唱约德尔调。这种音乐如今已成为一种流行的娱乐方式，不再是管理牲畜的实用工具，但它的田园起源仍然在电台热播歌曲中回荡^。3

Yodeling, for example, has been employed by herding communities for more than a thousand years, both as a call to animals and as a communication tool that reaches across pastureland to nearby villages. It’s a charming sound, with its alterations between low chest tones and high-pitched or falsetto notes, but not really a song in any true sense of the term. Yet yodeling started showing up on country records almost from the start. We hear it in the recordings of Emmett Miller, Riley Puckett, and especially Jimmie Rodgers, who turned it into a trademark of his down-home country style. “Everyone who could pick a guitar” was soon yodeling like Jimmie Rodgers, according to musician Herb Quinn, who performed in Mississippi in the 1920s. The music was now popular entertainment, no longer a functional tool in the management of livestock, but its pastoral origins still reverberated in the radio hits.³

然而，毋庸置疑的是：乡村音乐从一开始就不仅仅是古老民歌的复兴。星探拉尔夫·皮尔（Ralph Peer）或许是对这两种说法之间差异的最佳描述。在他晚年，一位研究人员找到他，试图挖掘皮尔倡导新音乐流派的细节。这位资深制作人声称，他一直在寻找“未来的民谣歌曲”。乡村乐迷或许推崇过去的价值观，但他们总是渴望新歌。这种对新奇事物的渴望不可避免地与民谣音乐家产生了分歧，民谣音乐家早在“最伟大的金曲”成为音乐产业的专辑概念之前就拥有这种心态。民谣歌手希望靠老歌（我们现在可能会这样称呼它）生存，而不是创作新歌。因此，与这种新型乡村歌手相比，他们更不擅长应对不断需要新鲜素材来兜售的音乐行业。“我定了一条规矩，”皮尔在信中澄清道，“不启用任何不会作曲的艺术家来录制唱片。” ⁴

Make no mistake, however: the country genre from the very start was more than just a revival of old folk songs. Talent scout Ralph Peer offered what might be the best description of the difference between the two idioms. When a researcher approached him late in his life, seeking to find details of Peer’s advocacy of new music genres, the veteran producer claimed that he had been seeking out “future folkloric songs.” Country music fans may have celebrated the values of the past, but they always demanded new songs. This craving for novelty created an inevitable rupture with folk musicians, who had a “greatest hits” mentality long before that became a music-industry album concept. Folk singers wanted to live off the back catalog (as we might describe it nowadays), not create new songs. As such, they were less adept at dealing with the music business, which constantly needs fresh material to peddle, than this new breed of country singer. “I made it a rule,” Peer clarified in his letter, “not to use any artist for a recording who could not compose.”⁴

你也许会感到惊讶——甚至沮丧——乡村歌手可以连续一个世纪创作关于同样老主题的新歌，却从未失去听众。但请记住，不断重申旧价值观是传统社会的运作方式。每周的布道不应该开辟新局面。乡村生活的蓝图不是未来的乌托邦——而是保留着过去的美好时光。但乡村音乐能够在美国城市化和郊区化的过程中生存下来，仍然是一个令人费解的现象。乡村音乐是第一种生活方式音乐，在兰德公司的战略家发明生活方式营销之前整整一代人的时间里，它都是以这种方式进行营销的。事实上，这种品牌建设策略早在生活方式一词进入英语之前就塑造了乡村音乐的形象。但我们如何解释这个令人费解的异常现象：即使在放牧和耕作的生活方式从经济中消失之后，乡村音乐不仅幸存了下来，而且实际上还蓬勃发展？或许，这才是乡村音乐营销背后真正的天才之举：意识到生活方式是投射幻想，而非活在现实中。从这个角度来看，我们喜爱的歌曲和音乐类型与其说是我们现实生活的镜子，不如说更像是PS过的图像，展现着我们渴望拥有的生活。所以正如狡黠的吟游诗人在封建制度崩溃很久之后仍在歌颂骑士及其效忠誓言，乡村歌手也用他们的音乐颂扬一个已经消失的世界，或者在很多情况下，对大多数听众来说，这个世界从未存在过。皮卡车一定象征着从未存在过的马；你不用把牛赶出去，而是从冰箱里拿出一箱六罐装的啤酒。

Perhaps you are surprised—or even dismayed—that country singers can keep on writing new songs about the same old subjects for going on a century, and never lose their audience. But recall that constant reassertion of old values is the modus operandi of traditional societies. The weekly homily from the pulpit isn’t supposed to break new ground. The blueprint for down-home living isn’t a future utopia—it’s holding onto the good ol’ days. But country music’s ability to survive the urbanization and suburbanization of America is nonetheless a puzzling phenomenon. Country was the first lifestyle music, and was marketed that way a full generation before the strategists at the Rand Corporation invented lifestyle marketing. In fact, that brand-building strategy shaped the image of country music long before the word lifestyle entered the English language. But how do we explain the puzzling anomaly that country music not only survived but actually thrived even as herding and cultivating lifestyles disappeared from the economy? Perhaps that was the real stroke of genius behind the marketing of country music: the realization that lifestyles are about projecting a fantasy, not living in reality. From this perspective, our favorite songs and genres are less like a mirror to our actual lives and more like photoshopped images presenting the lives we wish we led. So just as cunning minstrels still sang about knights and their oaths of fealty long after the collapse of feudalism, country singers celebrated a world in their music that had disappeared, or in many cases, for most of their listeners, never existed. The pickup truck must symbolize the horse that never was; and instead of rounding up the cattle, you just grab a six-pack from the fridge.

正是如此，乡村音乐的听众们也忠实于他们的新石器时代祖先。回想一下，新石器时代革命的断裂并非源于对农耕或畜牧的热爱；而是源于人们对稳定安定生活的偏爱，尽管这种生活枯燥乏味、重复重复，却胜过游牧民族冒险散漫的生活方式。从这个角度来看，即使在高科技数字时代，乡村音乐或许仍然具有现实意义，尤其是在我们的新技术看起来具有颠覆性或威胁性的情况下。

And in this way, too, the country audience was staying true to their Neolithic ancestors. Recall that the rupture of the Neolithic revolution wasn’t really inspired by a love of farming or herding; it was driven by the preference for a stable, settled life, despite its boredom and repetition, over the risky, rambling ways of the nomad. From that perspective, country music is perhaps relevant even in a high-tech digital age, all the more so if our new technologies seem disruptive or threatening.

二战前几年，好莱坞电影中牛仔歌唱形象的兴起，展现了乡村音乐为了推广其核心受众的生活方式幻想而付出的巨大努力。在这方面，乡村音乐略胜一筹：最终，所有音乐流派都依赖电影和视频来建立一种超越现实的文化精神。早在20世纪20年代和30年代，乡村音乐就已开始这样做，远早于MTV和YouTube的出现。吉恩·奥特里凭借其在好莱坞的牛仔歌唱生涯赚取了巨额财富，并凭借此跻身《福布斯》美国400富豪榜。作为房地产和商业巨头，奥特里住在南加州一座富丽堂皇的住宅里，但如果你走进他的衣橱——它比很多人的家还要大——你会发现250套西部风格的服装、50顶牛仔帽和75双靴子。他知道，他的财富建立在保持幻想的基础上。从肯·梅纳德到罗伊·罗杰斯，还有许多其他银幕牛仔，都以乡村歌手的身份大放异彩，甚至那些缺乏音乐天赋的人也受到激励，开始演唱。看看约翰·韦恩成为歌手的无数次（失败的）尝试吧。

The rise of the singing cowboys in Hollywood movies during the years leading up to World War II showed just how far country music was willing to go to promote the lifestyle fantasies of its core audience. In this regard, country music was simply a few steps ahead of the game: eventually all music genres would rely on film and video to establish a larger-than-life ethos. Country was doing this back in the 1920s and 1930s, long before MTV and YouTube. Gene Autry made so much money from his singing cowboy career in Hollywood that he parlayed it into a position on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans. As a real estate and business tycoon, Autry lived in a palatial residence in Southern California, but if you went into his closet—which was larger than many people’s homes—you would have found 250 western-style outfits, 50 cowboy hats, and 75 pairs of boots. He knew his riches were built on keeping the fantasy alive. A host of other screen cowboys, from Ken Maynard to Roy Rogers, flourished as country singers, and even those with little natural talent for music got prodded into vocalizing. Check out the many (failed) attempts to turn John Wayne into a singer.

即使在二战之后，乡村歌手们也依然保留着偷牛贼和牧场工人的装扮和形象。汉克·威廉姆斯在演唱他那首孤独的歌曲时，装扮得像个绅士牛仔；而帕齐·克莱恩则在拍摄宣传照时，摆出一副崭露头角的牛仔竞技明星。这种演戏一直持续到今天。你可以在达拉斯、休斯顿、纳什维尔和其他西部音乐中心逛一下午，也看不到一顶牛仔帽。但任何有自尊心的乡村音乐名人都不会不戴牛仔帽就去巡演。（直到今天，乡村音乐是唯一一个歌手可以秃头而歌迷永远不会发现的音乐类型。）口音也是如此。那些德克萨斯州的鼻音和密西西比州的慢腔已经在这些州的年轻一代中消失了。谁会感到惊讶？多年来，他们一直通过电视和电影学习语言技能，而今天的幼儿可能会花更多时间与人工智能助手交谈，而不是与血亲交谈。在未来，我们都会操着库比蒂诺或西雅图的口音。但听听最新的乡村音乐热门歌曲，你仍然会听到过去所有被精心保存下来的乡村口音，作为真实性的终极标志。在过去，牛仔需要快速拔枪；如今，缓慢的语调是通过试镜的首要条件。

Even after World War II, country singers adopted the attire and persona of cattle rustlers and ranch hands. Hank Williams dressed like a gentleman cowboy when he sang his lonesome songs, and Patsy Cline posed for publicity photos as though she were a budding rodeo star. This playacting continues today. You can spend an entire afternoon strolling around Dallas, Houston, Nashville, and other centers of western music without seeing a single cowboy hat. But no self-respecting country music luminary would go on tour without one. (To this day, country music is the only genre where a singer can go bald without fans ever finding out.) The same is true of accents. Those Texas twangs and Mississippi drawls have mostly disappeared from the younger generation in those states. Who can be surprised? For years, they have been learning their language skills from TV and movies, and today’s toddlers will probably spend more time talking to artificial intelligence assistants than conversing with blood relatives. In the future, we will all speak with a Cupertino or Seattle accent. But listen to the latest country music hit songs, and you will still hear all the countrified articulations of the past carefully preserved as the ultimate signs of authenticity. In the old days, a cowboy needed a fast draw; today, a slow drawl is the first requirement to pass the audition.

所有这些因素——服饰、口音和态度——使得乡村音乐成为传统主义者的完美配乐，而他们也对这一音乐类型有着强烈的忠诚度。然而，这又如何说明，即使是乡村音乐最终也需要歌颂反叛和叛逆呢？我们再次找到了令人信服的证据，证明音乐的创新几乎总是需要局外人的立场。到了20世纪50年代末，音乐界的每个人都明白了这一点。摇滚乐引领潮流，但所有商业音乐类型都在走同样的路。无论是推广格伦·古尔德、奥内特·科尔曼还是杰瑞·李·刘易斯，唱片公司都将这些冉冉升起的新星塑造成古怪、狂野、不落俗套的形象。即使是拉斯维加斯，这个为循规蹈矩的人群提供平庸而包装化的娱乐中心，也需要利用鼠帮的轻率和不良行为来打造自己的魅力。乡村音乐该如何对抗这种趋势？无论如何，这种秉持着既定方式和老式价值观的音乐需要发现自己的反叛特质。

All these ingredients—attire, accent, and attitude—make country music the perfect soundtrack for traditionalists, and they have embraced the genre with fierce loyalty. Yet what does it tell us that even country music eventually needed to celebrate rebels and renegades? Here again we find compelling proof that innovation in music almost always requires an outsider’s stance. By the late 1950s, everyone in the music industry had figured this out. Rock ’n’ roll led the way, but every commercial genre was following in the same path. Whether they were promoting Glenn Gould or Ornette Coleman or Jerry Lee Lewis, the labels marketed their rising stars as eccentric, wild, and unconventional. Even Las Vegas, the epicenter of tame and packaged entertainment for tame and packaged people, needed to build its allure on Rat Pack indiscretions and bad behavior. How could country fight this trend? Somehow the music of settled ways and old-fashioned values needed to discover its own rebel streak.

正是在这种迫切的需求下，一种名为“亡命之徒乡村”的新流派应运而生。它最初或许只是一个子流派，但最终却主宰了乡村音乐领域。该领域的新星几乎总是他们至少曾在监狱或戒毒所待过一段时间来提升自己的形象。最小的过错都会被夸大，以满足观众对他们新偶像不良行为的渴望。我们都知道约翰尼·卡什的亡命之徒经历——在《福尔松监狱蓝调》中，他唱过那句著名歌词：“我在里诺枪杀了一个人，只是为了看着他死。”事实上，卡什从未在监狱里待过超过一晚，他的罪行也极其卑鄙——1966 年，这位乡村音乐明星因深夜在私人领地上采摘鲜花而与法律发生冲突，结果只在斯塔克维尔市监狱待了几个小时。我在斯塔克维尔摘了一些花，只是为了看着它们枯萎。不，你不能推销这种东西。但让卡什先生一身黑衣，在最高安全监狱录制现场专辑……那就完全是另一回事了。就连主流观众也注意到了。

From this pressing need, the new genre of outlaw country was born. Perhaps it started out as a subgenre, but it came to dominate the country music field. The new stars in the field almost always had spent at least some time behind bars or in rehab to burnish their image. The smallest transgressions got exaggerated in order to feed the audience’s hunger for bad behavior from their new icons. We all know about Johnny Cash’s outlaw past—in “Folsom Prison Blues,” he sang those well-known lines: “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” In truth, Cash never had to spend more than one night in jail, and his crimes were as wimpy as they come—his 1966 run-in with the law resulted from the country star picking flowers late at night on private property, and he ended up in the Starkville city jail for just a few hours. I picked some flowers in Starkville, just to watch them wilt. No, you can’t market that. But dress Mr. Cash all in black, and record live albums at maximum-security penitentiaries… well, that’s an entirely different proposition. Even mainstream audiences took note.

即使是一成不变的音乐类型，时代也在不断变化。1952年，汉克·威廉姆斯因公共场合醉酒和扰乱治安被捕，他的名声一落千丈。但一代人之后，威利·纳尔逊却能将自己因持有大麻被捕的过往转化为公众形象的重要组成部分，并最终将其转化为商机。2016年，他推出了自己的大麻商业品牌“威利珍藏”（Willie's Reserve）。如今，一份严肃的犯罪记录与纯正的乡村音乐声誉相得益彰。约翰尼·卡什在福尔瑟姆监狱演出时，梅尔·哈加德当时还是一名囚犯，坐在观众席里。但仅仅几年后，乡村音乐观众就将他视为爱国主义和正直品格的典范。他的歌曲《来自马斯科吉的俄克拉荷马人》（Okie from Muskogee）成为一首定义定居生活方式的圣歌。

Times were changing even in the never-changing genre. When Hank Williams got arrested for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct in 1952, his reputation suffered. But a generation later, Willie Nelson could turn his history of busts for marijuana possession into a key part of his public persona—and eventually a business opportunity, when he launched his own commercial brand of pot, named Willie’s Reserve, in 2016. A serious rap sheet was now compatible with a pristine country music reputation. Merle Haggard was actually in the audience as an inmate when Johnny Cash performed at Folsom Prison, but just a few years later, country audiences embraced him as an exemplar of patriotism and decency. His song “Okie from Muskogee” was a defining anthem of settled ways.

但衡量“亡命之徒”运动成功与否的最终标准，还是在收银机上。无论是真实的还是市场营销部门臆想出来的不良行为，都带来了巨额唱片销量。当乡村音乐迎来首张白金专辑时，专辑名称就道出了全部故事。这张由韦伦·詹宁斯、威利·纳尔逊、杰西·科尔特和汤帕尔·格拉泽等人参与的合辑名为《通缉！亡命之徒》。封面设计得像一张来自狂野西部的通缉令。专辑一经推出就迅速售罄。

But the ultimate measure of the outlaw movement’s success came at the cash register. Bad behavior, whether real or imagined by a marketing department, sold records in huge quantities. When country music celebrated its first platinum album, the title told the whole story. This compilation, featuring Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser, was called Wanted! The Outlaws. The cover was designed to look like a wanted poster from the Wild West. The album sold as fast as they could press it.

这并不是什么异常现象。摇滚乐已经将这些变化强加于其他音乐类型。这是历史上第一次重大运动商业音乐拒绝合法化。人们很容易纯粹从经济角度来解释这种转变。根据这一假设，音乐行业最终在 20 世纪 50 年代末意识到，营销叛逆者比推广榜样更能赚钱。在过去，进入主流音乐领域可以致富，但随着审查法被推翻，社会规范受到抨击，另一种选择出现了。一场音乐运动可以把自己打造成主流音乐的持续祸害，同时仍然能够登上排行榜榜首。当运动中的个别音乐家选择合法化时（“出卖”一词很快就会进入摇滚乐迷的词汇），他们可能会被更具前卫精神的新人才所取代——如果我可以借用一个托洛茨基主义的说法，这个说法在这里似乎很合适，那么这个过程就会以一种永久革命的形式重复发生。

This was no anomaly. Rock ’n’ roll had forced these changes on other genres. It was the first major movement in the history of commercial music that resisted legitimization. It’s tempting to explain this shift purely in economic terms. Under this hypothesis, the music business finally realized in the late 1950s that it made more money by marketing renegades than from promoting role models. In previous eras, you got rich by going mainstream, but as censorship laws were overturned and social norms came under fire, a different option presented itself. A musical movement could set itself up as a constant scourge to the mainstream and still reach the top of the charts. When individual musicians within the movement opted for legitimization (the term sell-out would quickly enter the lexicon of rock fans), they could be replaced by edgier new talent—the process repeating itself in a kind of permanent revolution, if I can borrow a loaded Trotskyite phrase that seems rather appropriate here.

这种解释或许过于看重音乐行业了。许多顶级唱片公司的高管或许比任何人都更惊讶于摇滚乐的持久力。他们没读过托洛茨基的著作。这些旧体制的领导者或许认为摇滚乐只是昙花一现的时尚，是流行文化高速公路上的一条弯路，是一种新奇的声音，会像之前的许多音乐一样来来去去。但最终，即使是那些落后者和思想封闭的人也意识到规则已经改变了。如果他们需要提醒，只需打开收音机即可。

Perhaps this explanation gives too much credit to the music business. Many execs at the leading labels were probably more surprised by the staying power of rock than anyone else. They hadn’t read their Trotsky. These leaders of the ancien régime probably saw rock ’n’ roll as a passing fad, a detour in the pop culture highway, a novelty sound that would come and go like so many others before it. But eventually even the laggards and close-minded figured out that the rules had changed. If they needed a reminder, they just had to turn on the radio.

长期以来，乐迷和专家们一直在争论哪位音乐家发行了第一张摇滚唱片，谁是这场持续革命的发起者。我也曾被卷入这些激烈而毫无意义的争论，争论胖子多米诺、艾克·特纳、大乔·特纳、大妈妈桑顿、小理查德、比尔·哈利以及其他摇滚乐手的优缺点。但坦白说，这个问题无关紧要。真正的革命性变化并非源于音乐本身，而是源于听众。前摇滚时代的许多唱片都预示了未来。那些在20世纪40年代末50年代初熟悉芝加哥电音布鲁斯或黑人R&B的人，早已预感到了摇滚乐的雏形。但大多数美国白人青少年（以及几乎所有他们的父母）对他们的号召一无所知。许多黑人家庭也不赞同这些歌曲，从而引发了父母与青少年之间的冲突，这预示着社会学家后来所说的“代沟”。但早在摇滚乐出现之前，这些预期的声音就开始出现在意想不到的地方。点唱机经营者发现，他们可以通过将黑人 R&B 单曲放在白人社区来赚钱。这些地区的唱片店开始进货更多的黑人音乐——年轻买家坚持这样做。黑人和白人电台听众之间的分界线充其量只是一道薄弱的屏障，它在没有法院命令和国民警卫队协助的情况下被推翻。舞台已经准备好了。

Fans and experts have long debated which musician released the first rock ’n’ roll record, the instigator of the permanent revolution. I’ve been dragged into these heated and pointless arguments, debating the pros and cons of Fats Domino, Ike Turner, Big Joe Turner, Big Mama Thornton, Little Richard, Bill Haley, and other claimants to the title. But that question is, frankly, quite irrelevant. The real revolutionary change wasn’t in the music; it happened in the audience. Plenty of records from the pre-rock era anticipated the future. Those who were hip to the sounds of electric Chicago blues or black R&B in the late 1940s and early 1950s were already hearing the shape of rock hits to come. But most white American teenagers (and almost all of their parents) lived in blissful ignorance of their clarion call. Many black households also disapproved of these songs, setting off clashes between parents and teens that anticipated what sociologists would later call the generation gap. But long before rock ’n’ roll emerged on the scene, these anticipatory sounds started showing up in unexpected places. Jukebox operators found they could make money by placing black R&B singles in white neighborhoods. Record stores in these same locales started stocking more black music—young buyers insisted on it. The dividing line segregating the audiences of black and white radio stations, at best a weak barrier, got overturned without requiring the assistance of court orders and the National Guard. The stage was set.

或许摇滚乐在任何情况下都能点燃年轻人的热情。但主流文化的自满和墨守成规，无论是在音乐还是其他方面，都赋予了它额外的优势。20世纪50年代初，主流电台的DJ们向那些渴望更烈的无聊青少年兜售感伤的情歌和新奇的曲调。他们去哪里找呢？我们不应该惊讶于他们和他们的父母、祖父母一样，从非裔美国音乐中寻找前沿的声音。

Maybe rock ’n’ roll would have ignited the youth under any circumstances. But the complacency and conformity of the prevailing culture, both in music and other matters, gave it an extra edge. Mainstream radio DJs in the early 1950s were peddling sentimental love songs and novelty tunes to bored teenagers who craved a stronger brew. Where would they find it? We shouldn’t be surprised that they did the same thing their parents and grandparents had done before them, looking to African American music for cutting-edge sounds.

精明的音乐人抓住了机会。1955 年，查克·贝里来到芝加哥时，引起了马迪·沃特斯的注意，沃特斯将这位新人介绍给了自己的厂牌 Chess Records，在那里，贝里将被培养成另一位冉冉升起的布鲁斯/R&B 巨星。在不同的环境下，贝里的单曲“Maybellene”可能只不过是黑人电台播放的又一首 R&B 热曲；然而，它却卖出了一百万张，其律动比典型的 Chess Records 黑胶唱片更适合跳舞（并且具有更流畅的节拍）。几个月后，贝里在他宣言式的热门歌曲“Roll Over Beethoven”中宣布了他的新忠诚，并在歌词中使用了“摇滚”和“滚”这两个充满活力的动词，成为时代精神的护身符。查克·贝里不再是一个 R&B 巨星，而是一个真正的摇滚乐手。当他发行那首攀升的热门单曲《Johnny B. Goode》时，他的蜕变已然完成。这首歌的节奏纯粹摇滚，如同改装车的V-8引擎般轰鸣，仿佛随时准备迎接高中舞会的到来。

Savvy musicians seized the opportunity. When Chuck Berry came to Chicago in 1955, he caught the attention of Muddy Waters, who referred the newcomer to his label Chess Records, where Berry would be groomed as another rising blues/R&B star. In a different environment, Berry’s single “Maybellene” might have been just another R&B hit on black radio stations; instead, it sold a million copies with a groove that was just a little more danceable (and with a more streamlined backbeat) than your typical Chess vinyl. A few months later, in his declamatory hit “Roll Over Beethoven,” Berry declared his new allegiance, using the words “rock” and “roll” in his lyrics—these turbocharged verbs were now talismans of the zeitgeist. Chuck Berry was no longer an R&B star, but a genuine rock ’n’ roller. By the time he released his chart-climbing hit single “Johnny B. Goode,” the transformation was complete. The beat here is pure rock ’n’ roll, chugging along like a hot-rodder’s V-8 engine, and ready for the high school sock hop.

你不用再去城里那些肮脏的地方就能听到这些曲调了——那些肮脏的曲调自己会主动找上你。1956 年西尔斯百货的圣诞目录上，有一款售价 9.75 美元的儿童唱片机，广告宣传中印有一张甜美微笑的青少年听着他们最喜欢的童谣的照片。但是，如果美国白人主流社会的父母们知道自己会遇到什么，他们就会堵住烟囱，打发圣诞老人走人。他们无知地让黑人进入他们的家，甚至进入他们孩子的卧室。那个廉价的唱机不是互联网或智能手机；即便如此，在 20 世纪 50 年代，一种全球网络正在形成。不久之后，第一波半导体创新加速了音乐界的这些变化。事实上，第一批晶体管收音机上市的时候，摇滚乐正日益盛行。这是巧合还是因果关系？青少年可能是天使或懒汉，可能是即将上大学的或辍学的，可能是模范公民或少年犯，但他们每个人也都是消费者，他们的总消费金额日益推动着音乐产业的发展。

You didn’t have to go to the nasty part of town to hear these tunes anymore—the nasty tunes came to you. The 1956 Sears Christmas catalog featured a $9.75 children’s record player, marketed with a photo of sweet, smiling adolescents listening to their favorite nursery songs. But if the moms and dads of white mainstream America had known what they were getting into, they would have blocked the chimney and sent Santa packing. In their ignorance, they were letting black people into their homes, even into their children’s bedrooms. That cheap turntable wasn’t the Internet or a smartphone; even so, a kind of worldwide web was getting woven in the 1950s. Before long, the first wave of semiconductor innovation would accelerate these changes in the music world. In fact, the first transistor radios were hitting the stores at the very moment that rock ’n’ roll rose to ascendancy. Coincidence or causality? Teenagers might be angels or deadbeats, college-bound or dropping out, model citizens or juvenile delinquents, but each and every one of them was also a consumer, and their aggregate dollars and cents increasingly drove the music business.

音乐评论家查克·克洛斯特曼曾预言，“当摇滚乐被你的孙辈的孙辈们追溯性地重新审视时，后世会将查克·贝里视为关键的创新者和主导力量”。小理查德的热门单曲《Long Tall Sally》在《Roll Over Beethoven》发行前几周就已发行，他对此断言大为恼火，反驳说他发明了摇滚乐。这两种说法或许都没错，但在艾森豪威尔执政时期的美国，白人巨星对于确立摇滚乐在商业音乐领域的主导地位至关重要。在很多方面，20世纪50年代中期的这个关键时刻，让我们回想起我们之前研究过的主流化动态，无论是我们关注的是中世纪的游吟诗人、19世纪的吟游诗人，还是其他的同化者。但在一个重要的方面，随着摇滚乐的崛起，一些新的东西正在发生。即使是同化者和主流人士，现在也不得不变成流氓和反叛者，成为社会边缘的局外人。即使是合法化者也渴望获得非合法性。当迪卡唱片公司推广白人摇滚明星比尔·海利时，他的热门单曲《Rock Around the Clock》在这场运动的发起中发挥了关键作用，而营销文案则过分强调他贫困的成长经历，并让歌迷们知道他一边学习音乐，一边每天只吃一顿饭。这是第一首登上公告牌流行音乐榜榜首的摇滚歌曲，并在那里停留了八周。这首歌被收录在1955年由西德尼·波蒂埃主演的好莱坞电影《黑板丛林》中，这部电影讲述了一所充满暴力的多种族学校的故事，更加提升了它的吸引力。营销信息毫不含糊：音乐家虽然是白人，但他们的精神是黑人的，具有颠覆性^。5

Music critic Chuck Klosterman has predicted that future generations will look back at Chuck Berry as the key innovator and dominant force “when rock music is retroactively reconsidered by the grandchildren of your grandchildren.” Little Richard, whose hit single “Long Tall Sally” came out a few weeks before “Roll Over Beethoven,” would bristle at that verdict, countering that he invented rock ’n’ roll. Either of these assertions may well be correct, but in the context of the United States during the Eisenhower administration, white superstars were essential to establish rock ’n’ roll as the dominant genre in the commercial music business. In so many ways, this juncture in the mid-1950s brings us back to the dynamic of mainstreaming that we’ve studied before, whether we’re looking at medieval troubadours, nineteenth-century minstrels, or other assimilators. But in one significant way, something new was happening with the ascendancy of rock. Even the assimilators and mainstreamers now had to be rogues and rebels, outsiders from the fringes of society. Even the legitimizers craved illegitimacy. When the Decca label promoted white rock ’n’ roll star Bill Haley, whose hit single “Rock Around the Clock” played a key role in launching the movement, the marketing copy went overboard in stressing his impoverished upbringing, and made sure fans knew he survived on one meal a day while learning his craft. This was the first rock song to reach the top of the Billboard pop music chart, and it stayed there for eight weeks. But the tune’s placement in Blackboard Jungle, a gritty 1955 Hollywood film about a violent multiethnic school, starring Sidney Poitier, increased its allure. The marketing message left no doubt: the musicians might be white, but the ethos was black and disruptive.⁵

1955年末，摇滚乐坛不仅准备好迎接一位白人巨星，更是迫切需要一位。比尔·哈利已年逾三十，发际线后移，一副二手车推销员的模样，无法胜任这个角色。帕特·布恩翻唱了胖子多米诺的《Ain't That a Shame》，与《Rock Around the Clock》在排行榜上竞争，却缺乏青少年渴望的那种叛逆气质。布恩削弱了他演唱的每一首摇滚歌曲的影响力——如果他担心歌词过于尖锐，他甚至会修改歌词。卡尔·珀金斯曾短暂地成为白人音乐的希望，而他1956年初的歌曲《Blue Suede Shoes》的成功似乎真的改变了整个音乐格局。然而，命运在3月22日发生了改变，珀金斯遭遇了一场严重的车祸，让他在关键时刻被迫退场。珀金斯当时正开车去纽约参加一档备受瞩目的电视节目，这档节目或许能让他一夜成名，一跃成为流行文化的领军人物。然而，4月3日，埃尔维斯·普雷斯利在米尔顿·伯利秀节目中演唱《蓝色麂皮鞋》时，珀金斯仍在田纳西州休养。同月，普雷斯利的单曲《伤心旅馆》销量突破百万张，为他赢得了个人首张金唱片。卡尔·珀金斯此后再无冠军单曲。普雷斯利则拥有令人惊艳的十八首冠军单曲，并在之后的十年里主宰着广播电台。

At the close of 1955, the rock ’n’ roll world wasn’t just ready for a white superstar, it desperately needed one. Bill Haley, already in his thirties with a receding hairline and the look of a used-car salesman, couldn’t fill that role. Pat Boone, who was battling “Rock Around the Clock” on the charts with his own cover version of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” lacked the rogue quality teens craved. Boone diluted the impact of every rock song he performed—he would even change the lyrics if he feared they were too edgy. For a brief spell, Carl Perkins was the great white hope, and the success of his song “Blue Suede Shoes” in early 1956 looked like a genuine game-changer. But destiny intervened on March 22, when Perkins got into a serious auto accident that left him sidelined at a decisive moment. Perkins had actually been driving to New York to perform on a high-profile TV show that might have launched him into the stratosphere of pop culture. Instead, he was still recuperating in Tennessee on April 3 when Elvis Presley performed “Blue Suede Shoes” on The Milton Berle Show. That same month, sales of Presley’s single “Heartbreak Hotel” reached a million copies and earned the singer his first gold record. Carl Perkins would never have another number-one hit. Presley would enjoy a stunning eighteen chart toppers, and he dominated the airwaves for the rest of the decade.

我有个老爵士乐手朋友，在音乐史的转折点——大瑟尔——和杰克·凯鲁亚克以及其他“垮掉的一代”——混在一起（他甚至在凯鲁亚克的小说《大瑟尔》中扮演了一个角色）。他告诉我，20世纪50年代反主流文化的领袖们普遍认为摇滚乐是一种昙花一现的潮流。它来来去去，就像所有其他昙花一现的音乐潮流一样——布吉伍吉、曼波舞、女式尤克里里琴演奏者，以及其他类似的潮流。这些爵士乐迷根本无法认真对待摇滚乐，无论是简单的音乐、滑稽的乐队名称，还是更滑稽的舞蹈（1955年至1965年间，青少年们热衷于扭扭舞、华都西舞、摇晃舞、土豆泥舞和弗鲁格舞等舞步）。奇怪的是，20世纪50年代的“垮掉的一代”在很多方面都预示了20世纪60年代的整个嬉皮士运动，他们竟然错过了如此巨大的潮流，即使它已经触手可及。

I have an old jazz musician friend who was hanging out with Jack Kerouac and other beatniks in Big Sur at this turning point in music history (he even shows up as a character in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur). He assures me that the prevailing attitude among these leaders of 1950s counterculture was that rock ’n’ roll was a passing fad. It would come and go, like all those other short-lived music-business fads—boogie-woogie, mambo, female ukulele players, and other trends of that sort. These jazzheads couldn’t take rock ’n’ roll seriously, not the simple music, not the silly band names, not the sillier dances (between 1955 and 1965, teenagers embraced the Twist, the Watusi, the Shake, the Mashed Potato, and the Frug, among other dance steps). How odd that the 1950s beatniks, who in many ways anticipated the whole hippie movement of the 1960s, should miss such a huge trend even when it was at their doorstep.

但谁知道呢？或许如果没有猫王和他超凡的魅力，事情可能会有所不同。或许在某个神奇的平行宇宙中，爵士乐真的回归了，又或许一种更精致的流行音乐统治了电波。但那不是我们的世界。到了20世纪50年代末，记者们开始称普雷斯利为“摇滚之王”，不久之后就简称为“国王”。事实证明，他的统治是短暂的。但所有在他之后30多年的领导者和觊觎王位的人都声称自己是他的继承者。甚至音乐类型本身也有了一个全新的、更简洁的名字。它不再是摇滚乐，而只是摇滚，一种刺耳的喉音，完美地捕捉了音乐中不留情面的精神。到了1960年，摇滚已经占领了商业音乐市场，它非但没有成为一种时尚而消退，反而宣称自己是新的主流。

But who knows? Maybe without Elvis and his off-the-charts charisma, things might have played out differently. Perhaps in some magical alternative universe, jazz really did come back, or a more sophisticated kind of pop ruled the airwaves. But that’s not our world. By the late 1950s, journalists started calling Presley the “king of rock ’n’ roll,” soon abbreviating it to the simple honorific The King. As it turned out, his monarchy was short-lived. But all the leaders and pretenders to the throne who followed in his wake, for more than three decades, would claim they were successors in his lineage. And even the genre itself got a new, simpler name. It was no longer rock ’n’ roll, just rock, a harsh guttural sound that perfectly captured the take-no-prisoners ethos of the music. By 1960, rock had taken over the commercial music business, and far from burning out as a fad, announced itself as the new status quo.

二十五

25

我们的爱去哪儿了？

Where Did Our Love Go?

社会理论家马歇尔·麦克卢汉几乎在摇滚乐的巅峰时期宣称，“媒介即信息”——这是一个宝贵的警告，即使在当时，公众对现实的认知也正被屏幕和设备改变。但这位有先见之明的麦克卢汉先生或许也应该声称“媒介成就音乐”，因为这句格言同样适用，而且不仅仅适用于现代。一千多年来，每一次重大的技术变革都改变了人们的歌唱方式。埃尔维斯·普雷斯利是电视时代第一位真正的歌唱巨星，他的成名与20世纪50年代家庭晚间仪式中那种奇特的亲密感密不可分。但普雷斯利仅仅是众多媒介造就的明星中最新的一位，其历史可以追溯到乐谱的兴起和印刷机的出现，甚至可能更早，可以追溯到楔形文字和洞穴壁画的时代^。1

Social theorist Marshall McLuhan announced, virtually at the peak moment of rock triumphant, that the “medium is the message”—a valuable warning that the public’s perceptions of reality were getting altered, even back then, by screens and devices. But the prescient Mr. McLuhan might just as well have claimed that the “medium makes the music,” because that adage is just as true, and not only in the modern day. For more than a thousand years, each major shift in technology has altered the way people sing. Elvis Presley, for his part, was the first genuine singing superstar of the TV era, and his rise to fame is inextricably linked to the peculiar intimacy of that 1950s centerpiece of household evening ritual. But Presley was merely the latest in a long lineage of medium-made stars, dating all the way back to the rise of music notation and the introduction of the printing press, and probably even further to the days of cuneiform and cave drawings.¹

但不可否认的是，这些由技术驱动的转变在20世纪加速了。20世纪20年代，麦克风和录音设备的进步使得人们有了更多对话方式。歌唱成为可能，并导致了情歌和低吟歌手的兴起。有声电影的出现也产生了类似的影响——第一部有声电影《爵士歌手》将艾尔·乔森推向了新的明星地位，并帮助定义了我们现在所说的爵士时代，这绝非巧合。几年后，广播成为家庭娱乐的主要形式，这推动了魅力四射、幽默感十足的歌手的流行，他们是转移人们对大萧条忧患的注意力的大师，比如平·克罗斯比、胖子·沃勒和埃迪·康托。每个平台都定义了自己的互动规则。

But it’s hard to deny that these technology-driven shifts accelerated during the twentieth century. Advances in microphones and recording equipment in the 1920s made more conversational ways of singing possible and led to the rise of torch songs and crooners. The introduction of talking films exerted a similar impact—it’s no coincidence that the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, elevated Al Jolson to a new level of stardom and helped define what we now call the Jazz Age. A few years later, the emergence of radio as the dominant form of family entertainment boosted the popularity of charming vocalists with a genial sense of humor, masters of diversion from the woes of the Great Depression, such as Bing Crosby, Fats Waller, and Eddie Cantor. Each platform defines its own rules of engagement.

但电视需要的是另一种形象。到了这个阶段，视觉冲击力远比歌唱技巧或乐器演奏技巧重要得多。普雷斯利做到了——以至于他在《埃德·沙利文秀》上的表演跻身于二十世纪最重要的文化事件之列。普雷斯利首次客串演出时，就有六千万人观看，占电视观众人数的82%，这一刻让许多人铭记多年。

But TV demanded a different persona. By this stage, visual impact was far more important than singing skills or instrumental prowess. Presley delivered—so much so that his performances on The Ed Sullivan Show rank among the most significant cultural events of the twentieth century. Sixty million people watched Presley on his first guest appearance, a stunning 82 percent of the TV viewing audience, and this was a moment many of them would remember for years to come.

美国家庭的狭小空间似乎无法容纳猫王发自肺腑的歌声和他比以往任何电视网络节目都更色情的全身表演。据说，哥伦比亚广播公司的审查人员拒绝播放猫王腰部以下的片段，担心他扭动的臀部会激起青少年无法控制的情欲。这个流传甚广的故事并不完全准确，但事实更能说明问题。直到猫王第三次出现在《埃德·沙利文秀》上，摄像机才切掉了他著名的骨盆镜头。电视网络的高管们从惨痛的教训中认识到，全身表演的猫王对主流观众来说太过强烈。他第二次登台演唱《猎犬》已经越界，违反了某些不成文的公共道德法则；雪上加霜的是，演播室观众放肆的尖叫声让埃德·沙利文剧院的过道里仿佛正在举行一场狂欢。事后，愤怒的民众在纳什维尔和圣路易斯焚烧了普雷斯利的肖像、唱片和照片。（下一章，我们将从勒内·吉拉德关于公开的暴力献祭仪式的假设来探讨摇滚乐，但请注意，这些定期发生的焚烧事件在该流派的历史上出现得有多早。）联邦调查局则对普雷斯利的表演展开了调查，一名线人将其描述为“舞台上的性满足”和“穿着衣服的脱衣舞”。直到这时，审查人员才介入。但为时已晚；疫情已经蔓延，无法控制^。2

Those tiny boxes in American households seemed too small to contain Elvis’s visceral singing, full-body performances that were more eroticized than anything previously featured on network television. The story is told of CBS censors refusing to show what Presley was doing below the waist, afraid those gyrating hips would arouse uncontrollable teenage concupiscence. That oft-told tale isn’t entirely accurate, but the truth is even more revealing. The cameras cut off Elvis’s famous pelvis only on his third appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Network executives had learned the hard way that a full-body Presley was too strong a brew for mainstream audiences. His rendition of “Hound Dog” on his second visit had crossed a line, violated some unwritten law of public decency; adding to the controversy, uninhibited screams from the studio audience made it sound as if a bacchanalia were taking place in the aisles of the Ed Sullivan Theater. In the aftermath, outraged citizens burned Presley effigies, along with records and photographs, in Nashville and St. Louis. (In the next chapter, we will look at rock music from the perspective of René Girard’s hypotheses about public rituals of sacrificial violence, but note how early these burnings, which recur on a regular basis, appear in the history of the genre.) The FBI, for its part, opened an investigation into Presley’s performances, which an informant described as “sexual gratification on stage” and “a strip-tease with clothes on.” Only at this juncture did censors intervene. But it was too late; the contagion had spread, and could not be contained.²

如果要为早期摇滚乐打造一位完美的跨界明星，那蓝图就如同猫王埃尔维斯·普雷斯利一样。埃尔维斯强壮性感——他给人的感觉就像好莱坞明星詹姆斯·迪恩的阳刚之气，而后者在普雷斯利首次亮相全国电视节目的几周前因车祸去世。事实上，迪恩在1955年电影《无因的反叛》中的角色几乎可以被视为猫王形象的原型。 （顺便说一句，另一位有望成为猫王的替代者，伟大的摇滚偶像巴迪·霍利，在 1959 年死于飞机失事之前曾短暂挑战过普雷斯利，大约在同一时间，查克·贝里和杰瑞·李·刘易斯都因与未成年女性的关系被报纸报道而遭到强烈反对——所有这些都加剧了对手的死亡、丑闻和受伤的怪异模式，为猫王的至高无上地位扫清了道路。）在所有其他竞争者都被排挤之后，猫王除了自己的模仿者之外没有面临真正的竞争——而这将会变成一个至今仍在蓬勃发展的家庭手工业。但让我们公平地对待猫王。他那一代人，无论是歌手还是电影明星，都无法比得上普雷斯利的魅力和舞台表现力。他既讨人喜欢又讨人喜欢——这两种品质看起来可能差不多，但在超级巨星的世界里，它们很少共存。然而，普雷斯利也可能散发出这个永远的坏男孩的轻率和强硬态度；他是其他男人羡慕和效仿的对象，却绝不会介绍给自己的姐妹。这种危险的特质，如同一颗随时可能爆炸的炸弹，对他在一个建立在超越常规（无论是否具有象征意义）的音乐流派中成为明星至关重要。但最重要的是，普雷斯利拥有正宗的血统，我说的可不是伯克的贵族身份。在商业音乐的纷乱世界中，这种血统意味着他出身卑微，在密西西比州的图珀洛，沉浸在蓝调、乡村和福音音乐的海洋中。

If you were constructing the perfect crossover star for early rock ’n’ roll, the blueprint would look just like Elvis Presley. Elvis was strong and sexy—he came across as a more testosterone-charged version of Hollywood star James Dean, who had died in a car crash just a few weeks before Presley’s first national television appearance. In fact, Dean’s character in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause can almost be viewed as a prototype of the Elvis persona. (By the way, another promising Elvis alternative, the great rock icon Buddy Holly, would briefly challenge Presley before dying in a plane crash in 1959, and around this same time, both Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis faced intense backlash when newspapers covered their relationships with underage women—all adding to the uncanny pattern of rivals’ deaths, scandals, and injuries clearing the way for the supremacy of the King.) With all the other contenders pushed aside, Elvis faced no real competition except his own impersonators—and that would turn into a cottage industry still thriving today. But let’s be fair to Elvis. No one of his generation, whether singer or movie star, could have matched Presley’s charisma and stage presence. And he was likable as well as lovable—those two qualities may seem pretty much the same, but in the world of superstars they rarely coexist. Yet Presley could also exude the flippancy and tough attitude of the perennial bad boy; he was the guy other guys envied and emulated, but would never introduce to their sisters. That dangerous quality, like a bomb ready to go off, was essential to his stardom in a genre built on transgressions, symbolic or otherwise. But above all, Presley had the right pedigree, and I’m not talking Burke’s Peerage. In the topsy-turvy world of commercial music, that lineage meant humble origins in Tupelo, Mississippi, immersed in the sounds of blues, country, and gospel music.

你注意到这个规律了吗？塞西尔·夏普（Cecil Sharp）在寻找正宗的民间音乐时，曾远渡大西洋，前往美国南部最贫困的地区。唱片公司在寻找乡村音乐人才时，也做了同样的事情。罗伯特·约翰逊以及20世纪20年代和30年代传奇的布鲁斯吉他手都来自同样贫困的南方乡村。福音音乐和其他音乐流派的明星也是如此。如今，摇滚乐也遵循着同样的模式。想想一个奇怪的事实：所有这一切都发生在大量人口从南部农村迁往美国其他地区大城市的时期。为什么音乐会逆转这一趋势，迫使星探们前往这些贫困地区寻找创新的新风格和流派？除非我们理解音乐界内部人士和精英们所处的困境，否则这种反复出现的关联很难理解。他们渴望撼动现有范式的激动人心的声音，但他们自己就是范式。因此，他们必须始终突破固有观念和舒适区，去寻找下一个新事物。那么，我们是否会感到惊讶，曾经自诩为“叛逆之地”的南方，如今却沦为叛逆音乐的乐土？

Have you noticed the pattern? When Cecil Sharp was seeking out authentic folk music, he traveled across the Atlantic and went to the poorest regions in the American South. When record labels went on the hunt for country music talent, they did the same thing. Robert Johnson and the legendary blues guitarists of the 1920s and 1930s came from those same impoverished southern rural roots. As did the stars of gospel music and other genres. And now rock ’n’ roll followed the same formula. Consider the curious fact that all this happened during the period of mass migration out of southern rural areas and into the major cities of other regions of the country. Why did music reverse the trend, forcing talent scouts to journey into these poverty-stricken locales to find innovative new styles and genres? This recurring correlation makes little sense unless we grasp the dilemma of insiders and elites in the music business. They crave exciting sounds that shake the paradigm, but they are the paradigm. As a result, they must always look far outside their preconceptions and comfort zones for the next new thing. Are we surprised, then, that the same South whose self-made mythos proclaimed it the Land of the Rebel now had morphed into the land of rebellious music?

同样的模式也出现在美洲其他地区。在巴西，巴伊亚州对全国的音乐发展方向产生了巨大的影响，成为波萨诺瓦、热带主义和其他激动人心的新流派音乐巨星的发源地。为什么是巴伊亚州？它只是巴西26个州之一，人口约占全国的8%。你可以把它描述成巴西版的美国南部，比巴西其他地区更加非洲化，并且仍然背负着建立在剥削性种植园和强迫劳动基础上的悲惨历史的遗留。1835年的巴伊亚起义是新大陆唯一有记录的穆斯林奴隶起义，并在推动巴西的废奴运动中发挥了关键作用。巴伊亚仍然是巴西较为贫困的地区之一，但这几乎没有限制其丰富的音乐资源，它慷慨地与世界其他地区分享。我们发现探戈的兴起也存在类似的情况，探戈在……雷鬼音乐最初起源于布宜诺斯艾利斯的贫民区，后来演变成巴黎精英阶层的舞蹈。在牙买加，雷鬼音乐与拉斯特法里教派（Rastafarian）密切相关，该教派反对英国殖民文化，并在贫困和被剥夺权利的人群中积累了众多追随者。虽然雷鬼音乐的音效和风格各有不同，但它们的魅力都源于局外人和被边缘化的反抗姿态。

The same pattern emerges elsewhere in the Americas. In Brazil, the state of Bahia has exerted enormous influence over the musical direction of the nation, serving as a launching pad for the stars of bossa nova, tropicalismo, and other exciting new genres. Why Bahia? It is just one of Brazil’s twenty-six states, and contains roughly 8 percent of the population. You could describe it as the Brazilian equivalent of the American South, more Africanized than the rest of the country, and still living with the legacy of a tragic history built on exploitative plantations and forced labor. The Bahia Revolt of 1835 is the only documented instance of a Muslim slave rebellion in the New World, and played a key role in spurring the nation’s abolitionist movement. Bahia is still one of the poorer regions in Brazil, but that has hardly constrained its musical riches, which it shares generously with the rest of the world. We find a comparable situation with the rise of tango, which flourished in the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires before turning into the dance of Parisian elites. In Jamaica, reggae is closely connected with the Rastafarian community, which set itself up in opposition to British colonial culture and gained adherents among the poor and dispossessed. The specifics of sound and style are different in each instance, but they all built their allure on the defiant stance of outsiders and outcasts.

摇滚乐将这种反抗变成了音乐界的巨额财富，但它的成功也带来了一个问题：要怎么才能再次登台？摇滚乐是代表着永久革命的音乐，而和平正在世界各地爆发。到了20世纪60年代初，埃尔维斯·普雷斯利已经融入了流行文化的主流。好莱坞纷纷邀请他出演一系列热门电影——但请看看他电影形象的转变。在1957年的《监狱摇滚》中，普雷斯利饰演一名因过失杀人罪入狱服刑的囚犯。到了1960年的《士兵蓝调》，埃尔维斯在一部公式化的浪漫喜剧中饰演一位迷人而彬彬有礼的美国陆军士兵。这就是新的埃尔维斯，一个你可以介绍给妹妹认识的好男人。随着时间的推移，人们越来越难以将他视为詹姆斯·迪恩式的疏离叛逆者；普雷斯利更像是迪恩·马丁和洛克·赫德森的一个年轻、充满阳刚之气的替代者。

Rock ’n’ roll turned this defiance into a huge money-maker for the music business, but its very success posed a problem: What do you do for an encore? Rock was the music of permanent revolution, and peace was breaking out all over. By the early 1960s, Elvis Presley was already getting assimilated into the mainstream of pop culture. Hollywood came knocking and cast him in a series of hit movies—but check out the shift in his cinematic persona. In Jailhouse Rock (1957), Presley plays a convict in prison serving time for manslaughter. By the time we get to G.I. Blues (1960), Elvis stars in a formulaic romantic comedy as a charming and polite singing soldier in the US Army. This was the new Elvis, the nice guy you could introduce to your sister. With each passing year, it got harder to view him as an alienated rebel in the mold of James Dean; Presley was more like a young, virile alternative to Dean Martin and Rock Hudson.

他的音乐也在发生变化。1960 年，普雷斯利发行了他的第一张宗教音乐专辑《His Hand in Mine》，第二年又发行了一张专辑，其名字几乎可以作为新猫王的座右铭：Something for Everybody，这是一张甜美、感伤的流行和乡村音乐大杂烩，偶尔还会带点淡化的摇滚乐。这些对猫王来说可能很棒，但对摇滚乐来说却很糟糕。摇滚乐如果被同化就会消亡。然而在 1961 年和 1962 年，这似乎很有可能发生，当时公告牌专辑榜上充斥着百老汇演员专辑、电影配乐、民歌、柔和的流行音乐和轻音乐作品。摇滚乐手们轻松地融入了那个平淡的音乐场景，尽管令人沮丧，但却令人吃惊。如果摇滚乐想要保持其可信度，那么永久革命的音乐需要找到一个新的战场，与勇敢的新战士一起为之奋斗。

His music was changing too. In 1960, Presley released his first album of religious music, His Hand in Mine, and followed it up the next year with a project whose name could almost serve as a motto for the new Elvis: Something for Everybody, a sweet, sentimental mishmash of pop and country with occasional touches of watered-down rock. All this might have been great for Elvis, but it was lousy for rock ’n’ roll. Rock would die if it got assimilated. Yet that seemed likely in 1961 and 1962, when the Billboard album charts were filled with Broadway cast albums, movie scores, folk songs, gentle pop, and easy listening projects. Rock ’n’ rollers were fitting into that bland music scene with surprising, if dispiriting, ease. If rock wanted to maintain its credibility, the music of permanent revolution needed to find a new battlefield with gnarly new combatants to take up the cause.

我一点也不惊讶，当下一个新生事物进入摇滚世界时，主流媒体实际上将其描述为一次入侵——在这个例子中，是一次英国入侵，它在 20 世纪 60 年代中期彻底颠覆了整个音乐行业。回想起来，这一切都很有道理。如果音乐创新来自外部，那么它为什么不应该像军事进攻一样到来，像诺曼底登陆一样从另一个海岸登陆？在反思 1964 年 2 月披头士乐队造成的动荡影响时，《生活》杂志将乐队的出现比作二战轰炸：“就像闪电战一样，它始于尖叫、警笛和彻底的恐慌。”根据这家流行周刊的说法，其底线是：“1976 年，英国失去了美国殖民地。上周，披头士乐队将它们夺回。” ³

I’m hardly surprised that when the next new thing arrived in the rock world, it was actually described by the mainstream press as an invasion—in this case, a British Invasion, which turned the whole music business on its head in the mid-1960s. In retrospect, this all makes perfect sense. If musical innovation comes from the outside, why shouldn’t it arrive as a kind of military assault, a D-Day type beachhead from another shore? Mulling over the tumultuous impact of the Beatles in February 1964, Life magazine compared the band’s advent to a World War II bombing: “Like the Blitz, it began with shrieks, sirens and total panic.” The bottom line, according to the popular weekly: “In ’76 England lost her American colonies. Last week the Beatles took them back.”³

对于亲历者来说，这感觉既新鲜又陌生。然而，披头士乐队的到来只不过是重复了自古希腊时代以来推动西方歌曲变革和创新的同一动态过程，当时他们决定用来自其他文化的奴隶表演者的名字来命名他们最危险的音乐模式。即使在英国国内，娱乐界的精英们也被不守规矩的外来者所取代。这场英国入侵并非来自白金汉宫或唐宁​​街10号，而是源于远离声望和权力中心的地方。披头士乐队的故乡利物浦因成为这场运动的情感中心而声名狼藉。但令人匪夷所思的是，乐队成员的早期生活却在德军持续不断的空袭中度过，在即将到来的象征性入侵之前，他们经历了真正的战斗袭击。事实上，利物浦是继伦敦之后英国遭到空袭次数最多的城市，约翰·列侬正是在一次空袭中出生的。战后，当地人夸口说，格拉德斯通码头周围地区（位于约翰·列侬和保罗·麦卡特尼出生地的中间）是整个英格兰在闪电战期间遭受轰炸最严重的地方。

This felt like something new and strange to those living through it. Yet the arrival of the Beatles merely repeated the same dynamic process that had been driving change and innovation in Western song since the days of the ancient Greeks, when they decided to name their most dangerous musical modes after slave performers from other cultures. Even within Britain, elites in the entertainment world were now displaced by unruly outsiders. This British Invasion wasn’t coming from Buckingham Palace or Ten Downing Street, but originated far outside the centers of prestige and power. Liverpool, home of the Beatles, gained notoriety as the emotional epicenter of the movement. But how uncanny that the band members had spent their earliest days amidst constant German air strikes, real battle attacks preceding the symbolic invasion to come. In fact, Liverpool was the most targeted city in Britain after London, and John Lennon was actually born during an air raid. Locals bragged after the war that the area around the Gladstone Dock—located midway between the birthplaces of John Lennon and Paul McCartney—was the most bombed place in all of England during the Blitz.

某种程度上，利物浦战后从未真正恢复元气。德国人曾希望摧毁利物浦经济的支柱——港口；但未能如愿，而集装箱航运的兴起几乎在战后时期实现了这一目标。这几乎算不上一个有利于艺术革命的环境——直到你开始想想所有其他在工人阶级港口城市兴起的音乐创新，从莱斯博斯岛的米蒂利尼到密西西比河畔的新奥尔良，这些城市对多元文化的影响有着根深蒂固的开放态度。如果音乐创新来自外来者，那么这些通往外部世界的门户理应成为新声音和新风格的滋生地，这完全合情合理。

To some extent, Liverpool never really recovered after the war. The Germans had hoped to take out the port, the mainstay of Liverpool’s economy; but what it failed to do, the rise of container shipping almost achieved during the postwar years. This was hardly a propitious environment for an artistic revolution—until you start thinking about all the other musical innovations that have arisen in working-class port cities, from Mytilene in Lesbos to New Orleans on the Mississippi, with their ingrained openness to multicultural influences. If musical innovation comes from outsiders, it makes perfect sense that these gateways to the outside world should serve as breeding grounds for new sounds and styles.

20世纪60年代中期摇滚乐的这场巨变并非仅限于利物浦乐队，几乎所有领先的乐队都起源于英国传统音乐文化中心之外，起源于工人阶级社区和以工厂而非爱乐乐团闻名的城市。如今作为滚石乐队成员声名鹊起的米克·贾格尔和基思·理查兹来自达特福德，这是伦敦东南部的一个工业区，当时正努力适应当地制造业的衰退。动物乐队来自以煤矿闻名的纽卡斯尔，但最后一座煤矿已于1956年关闭。曼彻斯特是可以追溯到工业革命时期的劳工骚乱中心——卡尔·马克思和弗里德里希·恩格斯在制定共产主义议程时都曾亲自研究过这座城市——这里催生了赫尔曼的隐士乐队。托特纳姆是伦敦北部一个种族多元化的社区，大量非洲裔和加勒比海居民聚集在这里，催生了一个被称为“托特纳姆之声”的子流派，并成为戴夫·克拉克五兄弟的发源地。当然，英国的种族和文化状况与美国截然不同，但摇滚乐在英国的兴起似乎需要类似的社会经济环境，将自己定义为既定的权力和特权中心之外，也超出了以伦敦为中心的娱乐业的范围。

This upheaval in mid-1960s rock ’n’ roll was hardly restricted to Liverpool bands, but almost every one of the leading groups originated outside the traditional centers of British musical culture, in working-class neighborhoods and cities more famous for factories than philharmonics. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, now rising to fame as members of the Rolling Stones, came out of Dartford, an industrial area southeast of London struggling to adjust to declines in local manufacturing. The Animals hailed from Newcastle, famous for coal mining, but the last pit had closed in 1956. Manchester, a center of labor unrest dating back to the Industrial Revolution—both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels studied the city firsthand while formulating their communist agenda—spawned Herman’s Hermits. Tottenham, an ethnically diverse North London neighborhood with a heavy concentration of African and Caribbean residents, produced a whole subgenre known as the “Tottenham Sound” and served as the breeding ground for the Dave Clark Five. Britain presented a very different ethnic and cultural situation from the United States, of course, yet the rise of rock ’n’ roll in England seemed to demand a similar socioeconomic setting, defining itself outside the established centers of power and prerogative and beyond the purview of the London-centric entertainment business.

并非所有英国入侵摇滚乐手都出身于无产阶级。米克·贾格尔出身教师家庭，滚石乐队首次巡演时，他正在伦敦经济学院学习，准备从事商业事业——直到乐队获得唱片合约，他才退学。但即使这些音乐家的家庭在社会等级中处于中产阶级（或更高）的舒适阶层，这些艺术家作为表演者的血统也汲取了黑人和蓝领工人中最叛逆的实践者美国音乐。米克·贾格尔和基思·理查兹因共同喜爱查克·贝里和马迪·沃特斯的音乐而结缘，他们甚至以马迪·沃特斯 1950 年的唱片“滚石”来命名他们的乐队。披头士乐队的首张录音室专辑《Please Please Me 》中的所有六首翻唱歌曲都曾由黑人音乐家录制过。动物乐队凭借他们的热门歌曲“朝阳之家”声名鹊起，这是一首关于新奥尔良妓院的传统民歌。雏鸟乐队——一支帮助埃里克·克莱普顿、吉米·佩奇和杰夫·贝克开启职业生涯的乐队——作为一支英国入侵摇滚乐队而声名鹊起，但他们最初是一支布鲁斯/R&B 组合，只是逐渐适应了新运动的模式。几乎在每一个例子中，英国入侵都是建立在非裔美国人影响的基础上的。

Not every British Invasion rocker rose from the proletariat. Mick Jagger hailed from a family of teachers, and was preparing for a career in business at the London School of Economics when the Rolling Stones first started touring—he didn’t drop out until the band secured a recording contract. But even when the families of these musicians were comfortably middle class (or higher) in the social pecking order, these artists’ lineages as performers drew on the most rebellious practitioners of black and blue-collar American music. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bonded over their shared enjoyment of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters—and even named their band after the latter musician’s 1950 recording “Rollin’ Stone.” All six cover songs on the Beatles’ debut studio album, Please Please Me, had been recorded previously by black musicians. The Animals rose to fame on the strength of their hit recording of “The House of the Rising Sun,” a traditional folk song about a New Orleans brothel. The Yardbirds—a band that helped launch the careers of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck—rose to fame as a British Invasion rock group, but started out as a blues/R&B combo and only gradually adapted to the formulas of the new movement. In virtually every instance, the British Invasion was constructed on the foundation of African American influences.

你或许认为美国观众无需英国的指引也能融入这些本土活力。但“英国入侵”乐队不仅拥有其“局外人”身份的优势——这在大胆创新的音乐风格方面始终是一大优势——他们还持有外国护照，并在音乐组合中融入了本土特色和参考点。黑人音乐的影响显而易见，但它们已被彻底改变。保罗·麦卡特尼曾以为自己能像小理查德那样唱歌，但他从未真正做到——他的声音​​听起来像保罗·麦卡特尼。米克·贾格尔深受密西西比三角洲音乐的影响，大量借鉴了泥水乐队和嚎叫狼乐队的风格，但你绝不会把他误认为这些榜样。我们应该庆祝这些失败：基思·理查兹或许模仿了查克·贝里的节奏吉他演奏，但最终创作出了一些激动人心、与众不同、完全属于他自己的作品。埃里克·克莱普顿永远不会像BB·金那样独奏，但这也无可厚非。乔·科克尔试图模仿雷·查尔斯的歌声，但扬声器里传出的却是纯粹的摇滚乐。这些英国乐队在汲取经典音乐的同时，也创造了一套独具匠心、引人瞩目的新词汇。

You might think American audiences wouldn’t need guidance from England to tap into these currents of homegrown vitality. But the British Invasion bands not only possessed the benefits of their outsider status—always a plus in bold new musical idioms—complete with foreign passports, but added their own homegrown personalities and reference points to the musical mix. The black influences can be heard, but they are transformed. Paul McCartney thought he could sing like Little Richard, but he never really pulled it off—he sounded like Paul McCartney. Mick Jagger drank deeply from Mississippi Delta sources, borrowing heavily from Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but you would never mistake him for these role models. We should celebrate these failures: Keith Richards may have emulated the rhythm guitar playing of Chuck Berry, but ended up with something exciting and different and all his own. Eric Clapton would never really solo like B. B. King, but that’s no cause for complaint either. Joe Cocker tried to sing like Ray Charles, but what came out the loudspeakers was pure rock ’n’ roll. Even as they drew on old sounds, these British bands crafted a provocative new vocabulary of their own devising.

美国观众的热情之高，在现代流行音乐中前所未有。1964年2月7日，披头士乐队抵达纽约肯尼迪机场，引发了一场只能被形容为集体歇斯底里的观众反应。当乐队两天后，披头士乐队在艾德·沙利文秀上演出，约有七千三百万美国人收看了节目，这在当时创下了电视娱乐节目的纪录。观众中尖叫的青少年和音乐一样，都是故事的一部分。在 YouTube 上找到那个激动人心的时刻的视频，你会惊叹于旁观者的狂热，这比乐队的表演更能说明问题。狂热意味着金钱。1964 年 4 月 4 日，披头士乐队占据了公告牌百强单曲榜的前五名，这是该榜单历史上唯一一次出现这种情况。该杂志指出，DJ 们厌倦了播放披头士乐队的歌曲，但听众拒绝接受其他任何东西。如果这是一场真正的入侵，那么这场战争将是有记录以来最短的。披头士乐队和他们的许多模仿者——每个月都会有新的模仿者出现——从他们走下飞机的那一刻起，就击败了所有挑战者。

American audiences responded with a fervor that has never been surpassed in modern popular music. The Beatles’ arrival at JFK Airport in New York on February 7, 1964, set off a crowd reaction that can only be described as mass hysteria. When the band performed on The Ed Sullivan Show two days later, some seventy-three million Americans tuned in—at that time a record for televised entertainment. The screaming teenagers in the audience were as much part of the story as the music. Track down the video of that charged moment on YouTube and marvel at the delirium of the onlookers, even more revealing than the performance by the band. And mania meant money. On April 4, 1964, the Beatles held all top five spots on the Billboard Hot 100—the only time that has ever happened in the history of the chart. The magazine noted that disk jockeys were tired of playing Beatles songs, but listeners refused to accept anything else. If this had been an actual invasion, the war would have been the shortest on record. The Beatles and their many imitators—new ones would arrive on the scene every month—vanquished all challengers from the moment they stepped off the airplane.

但这里发生了一件令人惊喜的意外之事。在本书中，我或许已经传达了这样的印象：音乐的演进遵循着可辨识的规则和可预测的历史力量。但本书概述的这些过程并非铁律，而是适应性的行为模式。它们灵活多变，充满人性——最重要的是，它们超越了简单的因果预测。有时，整个音乐史会因为某个关键人物的突发奇想或个性怪癖而发生改变。而这正是1964年后摇滚乐的现状。

But here something delightfully unexpected happened. I have perhaps conveyed the impression, over the course of this book, that music evolves by means of discernible rules and predictable historical forces. But the processes outlined here are not ironclad laws; rather, they are adaptive patterns of behavior. They are flexible, multifarious, human—above all, human, which is to say, beyond simple predictive cause-and-effect calculations. Sometimes the entire history of music can shift because of a key figure’s whim or personality quirk. And that’s exactly what happened with rock music after 1964.

音乐界几乎每个人都想模仿披头士乐队，但事实证明，披头士乐队难以捉摸，也难以预测。他们每隔几个月就会改变音乐风格，每张新专辑都展现出不同的审美立场。到1965年，披头士乐队已成为模仿者和模仿者的目标，似乎有意放弃“英伦入侵”音乐的许多标志性特征。此时，NBC决定在一档每周电视节目中播放披头士乐队的模仿作品，并签约了门基乐队，这是一个极具吸引力的品牌，非常适合面向大众进行大规模营销。以同名乐队为主角的节目《门基乐队》于1966年9月12日开播。并提供了披头士电影《一夜狂欢》（1964 年）和《救命！》（1965 年）的相当令人信服的模拟。合法化过程似乎已在进行中，准备将披头士的声音变成主流，就像它对猫王和其他人所做的那样。但披头士避开了所有被归类的尝试。他们已经发布了《Rubber Soul》和《Revolver》，这两张专辑融合了实验性流行摇滚概念，吸收了从印度西塔琴音乐到西藏生死书等一系列影响。事实上，《Revolver》在 Monkees 首次亮相电视几天前就上市了，这使得模仿者和原版之间的差距非常明显。然后在 11 月，当 Monkees 沉浸在迅速消退的名气中时，披头士开始策划Sgt. 《佩珀的孤独之心俱乐部乐队》是一张迷幻的杂耍概念专辑，开启了他们职业生涯的全新阶段。

Almost everyone in the music business wanted to imitate the Beatles, but the Beatles proved cussedly hard to pin down and impossible to anticipate. They started changing the style of their music every few months, each new album revealing a different aesthetic stance. By 1965, the Beatles were already a moving target for copycats and wannabes, and seemingly intent on abandoning many of the trademarks of the British Invasion sound. At this juncture, NBC decided to feature a Beatles knock-off on a weekly television show, and signed the Monkees, an appealing construct suitable for mass marketing to the general public. The show The Monkees, featuring the eponymous band, launched on September 12, 1966, and offered a fairly convincing simulacrum of the Beatles’ movies A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). The legitimization process already seemed underway, ready to turn the Beatles’ sound mainstream just as it had done to Elvis and others. But the Beatles eluded all attempts at pigeonholing. They had already released Rubber Soul and Revolver with their eclectic mix of experimental pop-rock concepts drawing on a range of influences, from Indian sitar music to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In fact, Revolver hit the stores just a few days before the Monkees made their TV debut, making the gap between the imitators and the original all too obvious. Then in November, when the Monkees were basking in the glow of their rapidly eroding half-life of fame, the Beatles started hatching plans for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a kind of psychedelic vaudeville concept album that would initiate an entirely new phase in their career.

这场猫捉老鼠的游戏一直持续到20世纪90年代末，这或许是现代流行音乐史上唯一一次，整整五年都没有明确的榜样可供效仿。对许多艺术家（和唱片公司）来说，这无疑是极其令人沮丧的，他们的整个职业生涯都因此搁浅。但对于少数有远见卓识的人来说，在一个没有规则的音乐环境中，自由自在的音乐世界里，那种令人振奋的感觉让他们走上了令人兴奋的道路。新的子流派和风格在近乎无政府状态的混战中不断涌现，甚至一些老牌音乐流派也在缺乏明确方向或公认准则的音乐产业的影响下发生了变化。布莱恩·威尔逊放弃了创作关于冲浪的公式化歌曲，在披头士乐队的启发下，鼓励他那些不情愿的“海滩男孩”同事录制了《宠物之声》和《微笑》；后者是一个长期未完成的项目，用威尔逊的话来说，其目标无非是“为上帝献上一首青少年交响曲”。地下丝绒乐队也恰逢其时，他们融合了安迪·沃霍尔（首张专辑的制作人）的波普艺术，以及约翰·凯奇和拉蒙特·杨的前卫艺术理念，将各种元素融入到他们的歌曲中，探讨了此前商业音乐中禁忌的话题，例如吸毒、卖淫和虐恋。几周后，詹尼斯·乔普林，在她登上《在蒙特雷流行音乐节的舞台上，她以原始的情感力量深深震撼了观众，重新定义了摇滚时代女歌手的角色。那天，她以新晋巨星的身份走下舞台。反主流文化吉他手弗兰克·扎帕最近刚从圣贝纳迪诺县监狱获释——他曾因制作被当地政府认定为色情的录音带而入狱——如今，他正带着他的乐队“发明之母”席卷音乐界。这支不羁的乐队以前所未有的方式融合了坎普音乐、行为艺术和强劲摇滚。与此同时，另一支冉冉升起的南加州乐队“大门”凭借《点燃我的火焰》登上排行榜榜首，这首歌听起来更像是异教仪式的配乐，而非流行歌曲。与此同时，在大西洋彼岸，吉米·亨德里克斯体验乐队发行了其充满魔力的首张专辑《你体验过吗？》，这张专辑宛如萨满教的听觉盛宴，标志着迷幻硬摇滚的新高峰。

This cat-and-mouse game would continue until the end of the decade, and for perhaps the only time in the modern history of popular music, there was no clear role model to imitate for a period of five full years. For many artists (and labels), this proved tremendously frustrating, and entire careers went by the wayside. But for a handful of visionaries, the exhilarating sense of freedom in a music scene without rules launched them on exciting trajectories. New subgenres and styles were emerging in a quasi-anarchic free-for-all, and even old genres were morphing under the influence of a music business operating without clear direction or accepted guidelines. Brian Wilson gave up writing formulaic songs about surfing and, inspired by the Beatles, prodded his reluctant Beach Boy colleagues into recording Pet Sounds and Smile; the latter, a long-unfinished project, aimed at nothing less than serving up, in Wilson’s words, “a teenage symphony to God.” The Velvet Underground appeared at this very same moment, refracting influences ranging from the pop art of Andy Warhol (the producer of their debut album) to the avant-garde concepts of John Cage and La Monte Young—all channeled into songs that dealt with formerly taboo commercial music subjects, such as drug addiction, prostitution, and sadomasochism. A few weeks later, Janis Joplin, virtually unknown until she took the stage of the Monterey Pop Festival, shook the audience to its soul with a raw, emotional force that redefined the role of female singers in the rock era. She walked off the stage that day as a new superstar. Frank Zappa, a counterculture guitarist recently released from San Bernardino County Jail—where he had served time for making an audiotape deemed pornographic by the local authorities—was now storming the music world with his band Mothers of Invention, an irreverent ensemble that mixed camp, performance art, and high-powered rock in hitherto unheard ways. At this same juncture, the Doors, another rising Southern California band, climbed to the top of the charts with “Light My Fire,” a song that sounded more like the soundtrack to a pagan ritual than a pop tune. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Jimi Hendrix Experience released its incantatory debut album, Are You Experienced, a quasi-shamanistic aural brew that marked a new high point in psychedelic hard rock.

而这一切仅仅是 1967 年的事！

And all that was just 1967!

即使是民谣复兴运动的代表人物鲍勃·迪伦，也无法抗拒这种新的潮流：插上电源，尽情摇滚，挑战极限。1961年，迪伦登上纽约舞台，以现代吟游诗人的姿态吸引听众，他将传统民谣、老布鲁斯、抗议歌曲和巧妙的原声布鲁斯原创作品融合在一起，既民谣风情浓郁，又不失尖锐的旋律，令观众如痴如醉。你可以看出迪伦与老一辈歌手的渊源，尤其是伍迪·格思里和第一代原声布鲁斯演奏家，但他抵制了那种让许多其他民谣表演听起来像祖父沙狐球派对背景音乐的复古怀旧情绪。相反，迪伦为拉尔夫·皮尔的预言提供了确凿的证据，即市场真正需要的是“未来的民谣歌曲”。这几乎可以作为迪伦在英国入侵前的座右铭。但同样的前瞻性立场如今迫使迪伦适应了20世纪60年代中期蓬勃发展的音乐格局。1965年3月发行的第五张录音室专辑《Bringing It All Back Home》中，迪伦在专辑第一面融入了电声摇滚元素，之后在B面曲目中回归了纯原声格式。但所有关于迪伦忠诚度的质疑都烟消云散了。7月，他发行了《像一块滚石》（Like a Rolling Stone），一首充满活力的电音摇滚圣歌，霸占了整个夏天的电波。这首歌的歌名似乎就宣告了迪伦音乐世界的重新调整，以及这位艺术家追随那个时代杰出英国乐队开辟的新道路的决心。

Even Bob Dylan, the poster child for the folk revival movement, found it impossible to resist the new imperative to plug in, rock out, and push the limits. When Dylan arrived on the New York scene in 1961, he impressed listeners as a bard for modern times, mesmerizing audiences with his mix of traditional ballads, old blues, protest songs, and smart acoustic originals that somehow managed to sound both folksy and biting at the same time. You could hear Dylan’s ties to older singers, especially Woody Guthrie and the first generation of acoustic blues performers, but he resisted the retro nostalgia that made so many other folk music acts sound like background music for grandpa’s shuffleboard party. Dylan, in contrast, offered proof positive of Ralph Peer’s prediction that the marketplace really wanted “future folkloric songs.” That almost could have served as Dylan’s motto, pre–British Invasion. But this same forward-looking stance now forced Dylan to adapt to the supercharged musical landscape of the mid-1960s. For his fifth studio album, Bringing It All Back Home, released in March 1965, Dylan incorporated elements of electric rock on the first side, before returning to an all-acoustic format for the B-side tracks. But any doubts about Dylan’s allegiances were cleared up in July, when he released “Like a Rolling Stone,” a spirited electric rock anthem that would dominate the airwaves for the rest of the summer. Even the title of the song seemed to announce a realignment in the Dylan universe and the artist’s determination to follow the new trails blazed by the prominent British bands of the era.

迪伦的下一步举动，成了他从不缺乏新闻价值的职业生涯中最具争议的时刻。几天后，迪伦决定在纽波特民谣音乐节上与一支以电吉他和风琴为主的插电乐队一起演出。观众至今仍在争论当天究竟发生了什么，观众的嘘声究竟是因为音乐本身、糟糕的音质还是演出时间太短。但细节远不如神话般重要，神话迅速将实际情况变成了一种面向纯粹音乐主义者的道德剧。民谣音乐偶像皮特·西格对演出过程感到不满，但他并没有真的拿起斧头砍断舞台上为电声乐器供电的电线。民谣收藏家艾伦·洛马克斯并没有在后台与迪伦的经纪人阿尔伯特·格罗斯曼打架（好吧，他确实打了，但那是两天前，在另一场插电音乐会上）。许多类似的离奇故事在活动结束后流传开来。但即使在淡化了夸张和扭曲之后，更大的真相依然存在：伟大的鲍勃·迪伦现在觉得他需要适应流行文化的时代精神，尽管这意味着要离开许多最忠实的歌迷。而讽刺的是，与此同时，披头士乐队却更多地转向原声民谣风格的歌曲，其中许多歌曲的灵感来自迪伦的早期作品。仅仅几年后，一股原声创作型歌手的浪潮便涌现出来，他们的歌曲更像是迪伦早期的作品，而非任何电子摇滚的风格，他们的歌曲在排行榜上名列前茅。然而，在20世纪60年代后半期的精神中，这些都不重要了。时代精神要求不断创新。没有人能够停滞不前或重复过去的成功，而那些顶尖艺术家正是因为他们愿意打破最初开启他们职业生涯的桥梁而脱颖而出。

Dylan’s next step stands out as the most controversial moment in a career that never lacked for newsworthiness. A few days later, Dylan decided to play with a plugged-in band, featuring electric guitar and organ, at the Newport Folk Festival. Attendees still argue over what really happened that day, whether the boos from the audience were a response to the music or the poor sound quality or the short performance set. But the details are less important than the mythology, which quickly transformed the actual circumstances into a kind of morality play for music purists. Folk music icon Pete Seeger was displeased by the proceedings, but he didn’t really take an axe and chop through the cables that powered the electric instruments onstage. Folk song collector Alan Lomax didn’t really get into a backstage fistfight with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman (well, he actually did, but that was two days before, at a different plugged-in concert). Many such tall tales were told after the event. But even after toning down the exaggerations and distortions, the larger truth remained: the great Bob Dylan now felt he needed to adapt to the pop culture zeitgeist, although it meant leaving behind many of his most devoted fans. And there was heavy irony in the fact that, at this same moment, the Beatles were now turning more to acoustic folk-flavored songs, many of them inspired by Dylan’s earlier work. Just a few years later, a whole movement of acoustic singer-songwriters would emerge on the scene, climbing the charts with songs more like early Dylan than anything from the electric rock playbook. Yet in the spirit of the second half of the 1960s, none of that really mattered. The zeitgeist demanded constant reinvention. No one could afford to stand still or revisit past successes, and the leading artists stood out for their very willingness to burn the bridges that had launched their careers in the first place.

回想起来，这一切似乎都难以置信。你真的能靠那些不断颠覆自身风格、破坏那些将他们推上巅峰的音乐的音乐家们，建立一场大众娱乐运动吗？你真的能靠“不断革命”的概念，构建一个商业音乐流派吗？似乎这还不够，20世纪60年代末，音乐史迎来了最不切实际的一章，音乐史似乎即将驶入幻想的境界。这很奇怪，这很怪诞。我几乎羞于承认我对此有多么着迷。我想嘲笑它，但我做不到。

In retrospect, all this seems implausible. Could you really build a mass entertainment movement on musicians who continually subverted their own styles and undermined the very sounds that had raised them to the pinnacle of fame? Could you construct a commercial music genre on the notion of permanent revolution? As if this weren’t enough, the end of the 1960s brought about the most unrealistic chapter in the whole story, a moment when the history of music seemed ready to veer into the realm of fantasy. It was strange. It was bizarre. And I’m almost ashamed to admit how charmed I am by it. I want to deride it, but I can’t.

我指的是摇滚乐坛领袖们决心用歌曲来创造一种充满和平与爱的全新全球文化的那一刻。仿佛这还不够疯狂，他们的歌迷们真的开始努力实现这一目标——数百万歌迷走上街头，改变自己的人生，用爱至上的箴言来对抗社会大众。如果你在写电影剧本，这个结局肯定会因为太过天马行空而被否决。即使在像这样一部致力于音乐不断改变、迷惑和改变世界，挑战权力掮客和统治机构的编年史中，这样的雄心壮志似乎也超出了歌曲所能传递的范围。

I’m talking about the moment when the leaders of the rock movement decided that songs would now bring about a new global culture of peace and love. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, their fans actually started working to make it happen—millions of them taking to the streets, transforming their own lives, and confronting the rest of society with mantras of a love supreme. If you were writing a movie script, this ending would get rejected as too far out. Even in a chronicle such as this one, devoted to the notion that music repeatedly transforms and enchants and changes the world, defying power brokers and ruling institutions, such ambitions seem beyond the scope of what songs can actually deliver.

越南战争激发了摇滚乐界的热情。摇滚乐是抗议的配乐，甚至在“爱之夏”（如今被赋予1967年这场文化变革的中心点的名称）之前，它就已成为反对冲突人士的战斗口号。然而，抗议音乐并非一回事；摇滚乐的这一新阶段提供了更具远见卓识，甚至更具精神性的东西：它完全是一种对社会和日常生活的另类视角，拥有其自身的哲学、道德准则，以及（最重要的是）音乐颂歌。早在1965年，“花的力量”这个奇特的术语就进入了大众的讨论——或许是受到了艾伦·金斯堡提议抗议者向警察和政客献花的启发。大众媒体很快就开始报道“嬉皮士”——一种受摇滚启发的新生活方式的倡导者，这种生活方式几乎涵盖了反主流文化的方方面面，从迷幻药到色彩斑斓的破烂服装，尤其是抗议的概念，如今它已经不再仅仅是对……的评论。东南亚的战争体现了对所有传统价值观的不信任。摇滚不再是一种音乐类型；它，取决于你的观点，是一场变革性的社会运动，还是对既定模式的致命威胁。

The war in Vietnam had galvanized the rock community. Rock was the soundtrack of protest, and even before the Summer of Love—the name now given to this culture-changing midpoint of 1967—served as a rallying cry for those who opposed the conflict. Yet protest music is one thing; this new phase in rock offered something more visionary, even spiritual: nothing less than an alternative view of society and daily life, complete with its own philosophy, ethical code, and (most of all) musical anthems. As early as 1965, the peculiar term “flower power” entered the popular discourse—perhaps inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s proposal that protesters hand out flowers to police officers and politicians. The popular press was soon writing about “hippies”—advocates of a new rock-inspired lifestyle that embraced almost every aspect of the counterculture, from LSD to ragtag multicolored clothing, but especially the notion of protest, now morphing beyond a mere commentary on war in Southeast Asia to embody a distrust of all conventional values. Rock was no longer a music genre; it was, depending on your perspective, a transformative social movement or a deadly threat to established ways.

1967年6月25日，披头士乐队征服了全世界，在伦敦艾比路录音室首次通过卫星进行了全球电视直播。这在万维网出现之前就已存在，估计有四亿人观看了直播。从埃里克·克莱普顿到滚石乐队，其他摇滚巨星也受邀出席。这场盛会以一首歌的形式传递着一个信息：“你所需要的只是爱。” 从某种角度来看，这并非新鲜事——流行音乐一直以来都与爱有关。但在这一历史时刻，商业音乐所颂扬的爱与以往流行音乐中浪漫而肉欲的风格截然不同。1967年的爱情运动并非关乎性——或者说，不仅仅是性；那当然不是一个崇尚贞洁的时代——它还颂扬了一种准精神层面或社会层面的柏拉图式爱情，这种愿景不仅适用于拥吻的情侣，也适用于所有人。

On June 25, 1967, the Beatles commandeered the whole world, creating the first-ever global television broadcast via satellite out of the Abbey Road studio in London. This was the worldwide web before the World Wide Web, and an estimated four hundred million people watched. Other celebrity rockers, from Eric Clapton to the Rolling Stones, were invited to the happening. The occasion was a message in the form of a song: “All You Need Is Love.” From one perspective, this was nothing new—popular music had always dealt with love. But the love celebrated in commercial music at this moment in history was something different from the romantic and carnal varieties of previous pop tunes. The love movement of 1967 wasn’t about sex—or wasn’t only about sex; it was certainly not a time for chastity—but also celebrated a platonic love of quasi-spiritual or societal dimensions, a vision not just for spooning couples but for everyone.

此时，媒体开始定期报道一些奇怪的新聚会，称为“爱心聚会”或“聚会”或“突发事件”，这些群体活动都受到这种新氛围的启发。1967 年 7 月，在亚历山大宫举行的盛大伦敦爱心聚会上，每位参加者在门口都会收到一朵花，各种反主流文化运动似乎都在高音量的摇滚乐声中和平共处。三万人参加了在旧金山金门公园举行的人类聚会，即使停电中断了音乐，也无法破坏这种动感的氛围——毕竟，真正的好戏在参加者中间上演，他们中的许多人当天还带来了自己的化学娱乐。音乐正在重塑社会，唱片业正努力跟上一股无法控制、甚至大多无法理解的力量。仅仅几个月的时间，整个英国入侵之声就变得过时，流行金曲如今指的是这种新型的宇宙之爱。当时最时尚的电台播放着《Groovin'》、《Happy Together》、《Good Vibrations》等唱片，《The Happening》、《Mellow Yellow》，以及这场运动最具代表性的歌曲《旧金山》。这首歌建议听众前往旧金山湾区，但一定要“头戴鲜花”。许多听众一定认真对待了这句建议：在“爱之夏”期间，十万年轻人来到旧金山的海特-阿什伯里区，进行着一种追寻梦想的旅程，去感受电台里歌唱的那种迷幻、超然的感觉。

By this stage, media outlets were reporting regularly on strange new gatherings, called love-ins or be-ins or happenings, mass events inspired by the new vibe. At the great London Love-In of July 1967, held at Alexandra Palace, attendees were each given a flower at the door, and every kind of counterculture movement seemed to coexist peacefully amidst the high-volume rock sounds. Thirty thousand people attended the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and even a power failure that interrupted the music couldn’t disrupt the groovy atmosphere—after all, the real show took place among the attendees, many of whom had brought their own chemical entertainment for the day. Music was reshaping society, and the record industry was struggling to keep up with a force beyond its control, and mostly beyond its comprehension. In just a matter of months, the whole British Invasion sound became outmoded, and pop hits were now referring to this new kind of cosmic love. The hippest radio stations of the period were spinning records such as “Groovin’,” “Happy Together,” “Good Vibrations,” “The Happening,” “Mellow Yellow,” and perhaps the most emblematic song of the movement, “San Francisco,” which advised listeners to head to the City by the Bay, but make sure to “wear flowers in your hair.” Many listeners must have taken this advice seriously: one hundred thousand young people arrived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the Summer of Love on a kind of vision quest to tap into the trippy, transcendental feelings sung about on the radio.

这个故事的结局当然很糟糕。但其糟糕结局的真正原因值得探究。这将有助于我们理解音乐作为社会变革力量的矛盾本质。我们已经看到太多歌曲在歌词中宣扬爱的同时却煽动暴力的例子。20 世纪 60 年代末是这种矛盾最明显的例子。1967 年的流行音乐氛围与 1968 年的社会动荡无缝衔接，摇滚乐是这两场运动的配乐。地下气象员组织是一个在政府大楼、银行和其他公共场所引爆炸弹的革命组织，其名字取自鲍勃·迪伦的一句歌词。查尔斯·曼森是一个残忍团伙的头目，犯下了 20 世纪 60 年代末一些最引人注目的谋杀案，他将披头士乐队的歌曲“Helter Skelter”作为他的个人主题曲。曼森本人也是一位胸怀大志的摇滚歌手，而得知在他走上杀戮狂潮之前，音乐界的许多人对他如此重视，令人不安。（但这或许并不像乍一看那么奇怪：当时超级巨星歌手的人口统计特征——年轻、男性、单身，拥有尼采式的权力意志——与被定罪的杀人犯有着惊人的相似之处。）到了1969年，爱情和热闹的世界已成为模糊的记忆。那年夏天，旧金山最大的新闻聚焦于“十二宫杀手”，一个喜欢谋杀正在浪漫约会的年轻情侣，然后向当地媒体发送加密信息，偶尔还会引用歌词的疯子。那一年最臭名昭著的摇滚活动是阿尔塔蒙特免费音乐会，吸引了30万人参加，但却因其暴力和死亡而被人们铭记。米克·贾格尔乘直升机抵达后不久，就被……一位愤怒的粉丝，事情在滚石乐队演出时变得更糟，一群人冲上舞台，引发了负责活动安保的地狱天使帮派成员的报复。其中一位名叫梅雷迪斯·亨特的观众掏出一把左轮手枪，随后被一名安保人员刺伤并殴打致死。这件事发生在1969年12月6日——但这不仅仅是一个十年的结束；它标志着流行音乐史上最乐观时代的非正式终结。事情怎么会变化得这么快？我们怎么会在短短几个月内就从“你需要的只是爱”发展到阿尔塔蒙特的愤怒？

This story, of course, ends badly. But it’s worth probing exactly why it ends badly. This will help us understand the paradoxical nature of music as a force of social change. We have already seen so many examples of songs inciting violence even as they promote love in their lyrics. The late 1960s presents the most glaring examples of this contradiction. The groovy atmosphere of 1967 flowed seamlessly into the social upheavals of 1968, and rock music was the soundtrack of both movements. The Weather Underground, a revolutionary group that detonated bombs at government buildings, banks, and other public places, took its name from a Bob Dylan lyric. Charles Manson, the leader of a ruthless gang that committed some of the most high-profile murders of the late 1960s, adopted the Beatles track “Helter Skelter” as his personal theme song. Manson was an aspiring rock singer himself, and it’s disturbing to learn how seriously many people in the music business took him before he went on a killing rampage. (But perhaps that’s not as strange as it seems at first blush: the demographic profile of superstar singers during this period—young, male, single, and possessing a Nietzschean will to power—shows an eerie similarity to that of convicted murderers.) By 1969, the world of love and happenings was already becoming a dim memory. The biggest news story in San Francisco that summer focused on the Zodiac Killer, a lunatic who liked to murder young couples out on romantic dates, and then send encrypted messages about it to the local press, occasionally quoting song lyrics. The most infamous rock event that year was the Altamont Free Concert, which drew three hundred thousand people, but is remembered for its violence and deaths. Within moments of arriving by helicopter, Mick Jagger was punched by an enraged fan, and things got worse during the Rolling Stones’ performance, when a group rushed the stage and spurred reprisals from the Hells Angels gang members handling event security. One of the attendees, Meredith Hunter, drew a revolver, then was stabbed and beaten to death by a member of the security crew. That took place on December 6, 1969—but it was more than the end of a decade; it was the unofficial end of the most optimistic era in popular music. How did things change so quickly? How did we go, within a few months, from “All You Need Is Love” to the rage of Altamont?

阿尔塔蒙特事件余波未平，参与者和评论员纷纷寻求解释。或许最离奇的莫过于地下报纸《伯克利·巴布》（Berkeley Barb）和其他非官方消息来源流传的猜测，称亨特的谋杀是米克·贾格尔亲自主持的一场祭祀仪式。就连更可靠的反主流文化新闻期刊《滚石》也错误地宣称，谋杀发生在贾格尔演唱《同情魔鬼》（Sympathy for the Devil）期间（实际上，谋杀发生在四首歌之后，演唱《在我的拇指下》（Under My Thumb）期间）。这或许是拙劣的新闻报道，但根据阿尔塔蒙特历史学家索尔·奥斯特利茨的说法，这也代表了一种“魔法或宗教思维”，或者说是“某种形式的愿望实现”。他指出：“歌迷们真的希望米克·贾格尔拥有足够强大的力量来召唤魔鬼。” ⁴

In Altamont’s aftermath, participants and commentators sought explanations. Perhaps the strangest was speculation, circulated in the underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb and other less-than-official sources, that Hunter’s murder was a ritual sacrifice presided over by Mick Jagger himself. Even Rolling Stone, a more reliable periodical for counterculture news, announced incorrectly that the killing had taken place while Jagger was singing “Sympathy for the Devil” (actually it happened four songs later, during “Under My Thumb”). This may have been shoddy journalism, but also represented a kind of “magical or religious thinking,” or “form of wish fulfillment,” according to Altamont historian Saul Austerlitz. “The fans,” he notes, “really did want Mick Jagger to be powerful enough to summon the Devil.”⁴

人们不再沉迷于爱情——他们现在担心会召唤恶魔！这种转变并非仅仅是恶业或一次糟糕的迷幻之旅的结果，尽管身体化学反应确实起了作用。在人类历史的开端，我们研究了一种有趣的激素——催产素。它通过下丘脑发出的信息，在受到某些关键刺激（包括音乐）时释放到血液中。当我们唱歌时，这种激素会让我们与同伴产生情感联系。这就是为什么所有国家都有国歌，体育迷们会唱他们球队的队歌。有些人甚至把催产素称为“爱情激素”或“拥抱激素”。这并非毫无道理：你的父母第一次约会可能参加了一些与音乐表演、音乐会、舞会或学校毕业舞会增进感情，或者浪漫的……电影片尾字幕上会放一些感伤的歌曲。但这仅仅是故事的一半。催产素还会动员人们对抗其他群体。这种激素在压力下会分泌，并可能引发骚乱或战斗。这解释了为什么军事组织也有自己的音乐——进行曲而非感伤歌曲。也解释了为什么上面提到的那些运动队的旋律通常被称为“战歌”，或者为什么抗议者会通过唱歌或高呼口号来表达愤怒。换句话说，催产素的双重作用为音乐的双重作用提供了一个平台。如果我们不理解这个看似矛盾的现象，就永远无法理解歌曲在社会中的真正作用。诗人告诉我们，音乐是爱的食粮，但他们也应该警告我们，歌曲可能煽动暴力和野蛮。这或许是一个令人不快的事实——或许这种不快解释了为什么音乐与暴力的关系在学术研究中很少被探讨——但音乐史学家绝不能忽视这一点。

No more summering in love—people were now worried about summoning Beelzebub! And this shift wasn’t just the result of bad karma or a bad acid trip, although body chemistry does play a role. Back at the beginning of our history, we looked at that intriguing hormone oxytocin, which is released into the body’s bloodstream via a message from the hypothalamus in response to certain crucial stimuli, including music. When we sing, this hormone makes us feel emotional bonds with those in our group. That’s why countries all have national anthems, and sports fans sing their team songs. Some people even call oxytocin the “love hormone” or the “cuddle hormone.” And not without reason: your parents probably went on their first date to some event that involved the performance of music, bonding at a concert, a dance or school prom, or romantic movie with some sentimental song over the closing credits. But all this is only half the story. Oxytocin also mobilizes people to fight against other groups. This hormone emerges in situations of stress, and can send people into riots or battles. That explains why military organizations also have their music—marches instead of sentimental songs. And it’s why those sports team melodies mentioned above are often called “fight songs,” or why protesters express their anger by singing or chanting. In other words, the double role of the hormone is a platform for the double role of music. We will never understand the real role of songs in society if we don’t grasp this seeming paradox. Poets tell us that music is the food of love, but they also ought to warn us that songs can stir up violence and brutality. This may be an unpleasant truth—and perhaps this unpleasantness explains why the relationship of music and violence is rarely explored in scholarly studies—but not one a historian of music can afford to ignore.

这就是为什么我们的“爱之夏”无法持久。但这也是它最终会卷土重来的原因，只不过是以不同的形式和新的名字。它总是如此。而且每次它出现时，都会带来新的配乐。我想，正是因为我们不可避免地会绕道走向黑暗面，我们才更加渴望那种幸福的景象。

That’s why our Summer of Love couldn’t last. But it’s also why it will come back again, in some different manifestation and under a new name. It always does. And each time it brings a new soundtrack with it when it arrives on the scene. I suspect we crave that blissful vision all the more because of our inevitable detours into the dark side.

二十六

26

祭祀仪式

The Sacrificial Ritual

这里有一个谜题需要你解答。我会写下一些名字，你需要找出他们有什么共同点。

Here is a puzzle for you to solve. I will write down a list of names, and you need to figure out what they have in common.

让我先从这两个开始：

Let me start with these two:

或许你已经猜到这份名单里会有什么了。不过，我们再补充几个名字：

Perhaps you already have a hunch what this list contains. But let’s add a few more names:

至此，毫无疑问。我列出的是摇滚乐坛最具影响力的乐队。他们或许甚至是摇滚名人堂的首批入选者，或是那些杂志评选的史上最伟大乐队中票数最高的乐队。

By this point, there can be little doubt. I am listing the most influential bands in rock music. Maybe these were even the initial inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the top vote-getters on one of those recurring magazine polls of all-time greats.

但如果你猜到了这一点，你就错了。让我们继续这个清单，但会添加一些更详细的内容。

But if you guessed this, you would be wrong. Let’s continue the list, but with the addition of some more details.

一位研究这份名单的精算师不得不得出结论：摇滚明星是世界上最危险的职业。很抱歉，我们不能承保你的人寿保险，因为你弹的是电吉他。怎么会有这么多超级明星乐队的创始成员在四十岁甚至更年轻的时候就去世？更令人不安的是，这些死亡案例中没有一例可以归因于“自然原因”。这些超级明星中没有一例是在家人的陪伴下安详地在床上离世的。你不需要统计学家就能告诉你，这不可能是巧合。发生这种情况的可能性微乎其微。有些人或许会将这些死亡归咎于运气不佳——约翰·列侬在错误的时间出现在了错误的地点；丹尼斯·威尔逊在游泳时遭遇了任何人都可能发生的意外；等等——但累积的证据驳斥了这种过于简单的说法。（顺便说一句，即使排除列侬，我们仍然会看到披头士乐队第一贝斯手斯图尔特·萨特克利夫的悲剧，他在1961年的一场演出后因殴打而身亡，年仅21岁。摇滚乐是危险的缪斯女神。）

An actuary studying this list would be forced to conclude that rock star is the world’s most dangerous occupation. I’m sorry, we can’t underwrite your life insurance policy because you play electric guitar. How can so many superstar bands lose founding members at the age of forty or younger? Even more disturbing, not one of these deaths can be attributed to “natural causes.” None of these superstars died quietly in bed surrounded by family. You don’t need a statistician to tell you that this cannot be a matter of coincidence. The odds against that would be astronomical. Some might dismiss these deaths as little more than bad luck—John Lennon was in the wrong place at the wrong time; Dennis Wilson had a swimming accident that could happen to anyone; and so on—but the cumulative evidence resists such simplistic narratives. (By the way, even if you eliminate Lennon from consideration, we are still left with the tragic case of the Beatles’ first bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, dead at age twenty-one from the effects of a beating after a 1961 gig. Rock is a dangerous muse.)

对此有各种各样的解释，但每一种解释都令人不安。或许摇滚乐迷脑子有病，被社会上那些最有自我毁灭倾向的人所吸引——他们把那些最终会自我毁灭的人捧上天。或许这正是乐迷们希望从他们喜爱的摇滚明星身上看到的。想想键盘手伊恩·斯图尔特的例子，他于1963年因长相太普通而被迫退出滚石乐队。精算师们会对此作何评价？又或许，这个职业一旦成功就会改变人们，把他们变成胆大妄为的人、瘾君子、一心想毁灭一切的疯子。又或许，创作前沿音乐也会带来极大的危险，比如接触辐射或致命病原体。早逝的风险只是那些梦想家的职业描述的一部分，他们超越了束缚我们其他人的枯燥界限。又或许，上帝就是不喜欢摇滚乐。选择你认为正确的答案，并思考其中的含义。

Various explanations can be offered, but every one of them is disturbing to consider. Perhaps rock fans are sick in the head, attracted to the most self-destructive personalities in society—they elevate to fame the very characters who will destroy themselves. Maybe that’s what fans want from their favorite rock stars. Consider the revealing case of keyboardist Ian Stewart, who was forced out of the Rolling Stones in 1963 because he looked too normal. What would the actuaries say about that? Or perhaps the profession changes people once they experience success, turning them into daredevils, drug addicts, maniacs hell-bent on destruction. Or ponder the possibility that creating music at the cutting edge brings extreme danger along with it, like a career involving exposure to radiation or deadly pathogens. The risk of early death is simply part of the job description of visionaries who operate beyond the boring boundaries that constrain the rest of us. Or maybe God just doesn’t like rock ’n’ roll. Take your pick, and consider the implications.

然而，音乐表演与暴力之间反复出现的联系，可以追溯到乐器作为杀戮工具和被肢解的猎物残骸的起源——猎人的弓、兽角、粗糙的鼓、骨笛、羊肠弦——表明摇滚乐手英年早逝只是这种长期联系的又一体现。音乐一直是一项充满风险的事业，是与流血联系最紧密的艺术形式。许多传统仪式将音乐与暴力结合在一起，并以各种不同的方式表现出来：战争、武术、牺牲、在热煤上行走、穿刺、极端自残等等。你可以在美洲的太阳舞中找到这些，印度的卡瓦迪·阿塔姆（Kavadi Attam），保加利亚的阿纳斯特纳里亚（Anastenaria），巴西的卡波耶拉（Capoeira），以及世界其他地方。在现代，残酷通常是潜伏的而非现实的：危险已被转化为象征。在大多数情况下，仪式已经完全驯服了风险，以至于风险几乎无法辨认。但在特别激烈的场合，无论是阿尔塔蒙特（Altamont），斯特拉文斯基《春之祭》 （Le sacre du springtemps ）的首演，还是性手枪乐队（Sex Pistols）在冬日乐园（Winterland）的最后一场演出，象征和仪式都无法再容纳舞台上表演者所激发的强烈情感。人群寻求一种宣泄无法控制的冲动的渠道，甚至可能是一个真正的牺牲品，无论是为了寻求超越合理界限的宣泄，还是为了作为他们本应施加于彼此的暴力的替罪羊。摇滚乐，作为永恒革命的音乐，其本质在于接近那个临界点，在那里象征转化为真实的暴力，但又不跨越分界线。有时，摇滚乐的说辞似乎要求真正的牺牲，但这与其说是真正的建议，不如说是一种姿态。“摇滚乐如此伟大，人们应该开始为它献身，”卢·里德曾宣称。“人们必须为音乐献身。人们为其他一切献身，那么为什么不为音乐献身呢？为它献身。难道这不美好吗？”里德当然有些夸张，但他的说法也并非完全错误。摇滚乐的真正目标是玩火自焚。但谁能真正掌握这种边缘政策呢？¹

But the recurring connection between musical performance and violence, dating back to the very origins of instruments as killing tools and pieces of the dismembered bodies of prey—the hunter’s bow, the animal’s horn, the hidebound drum, the bone flute, the gut strings—suggests that rock ’n’ rollers dying young is just one more manifestation of a long-standing linkage. Music has always been a risky business, the art form most closely linked to spilled blood. So many traditional rituals combine music and violence, manifested in so many different ways: warfare, martial arts, victim sacrifice, walking on hot coals, piercings, extreme self-mutilation, and on and on. You find these in the Sun Dance in the Americas, the Kavadi Attam in India, the Anastenaria in Bulgaria, capoeira in Brazil, and everywhere else you look in the world. In modern times, the brutality is typically latent rather than actualized: the danger has been turned into a symbol. In most instances, the ritual has so completely tamed the risks that the latter are almost unrecognizable. But on occasions of particular intensity, whether Altamont or the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps or the Sex Pistols’ last concert at Winterland, symbols and rituals can no longer contain the powerful emotions aroused by the performers onstage. The crowd seeks a channel for uncontrollable impulses, perhaps even an actual sacrificial victim, whether in a quest for catharsis gone beyond reasonable bounds or as a scapegoat for violence they would otherwise inflict upon each other. The essence of rock, as the music of permanent revolution, is to approach that liminal point where symbol turns into actual violence, but without crossing over the dividing line. Sometimes the rhetoric of rock seems to demand actual sacrifice, but that is more a posture than a genuine proposal. “Rock and roll is so great, people should start dying for it,” Lou Reed once announced. “The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music? Die for it. Isn’t it pretty?” Reed was exaggerating, of course, but he wasn’t far off the mark. The real goal of rock is to play with fire without getting burned. But who can really master that game of brinkmanship?¹

这种牺牲的必要性在演出中精心策划的狂热时刻，仪式性地毁坏乐器的举动最为明显。摇滚乐并非这种奇观的发明者，但它很快意识到，它的力量可以替代针对乐队或观众的实际肢体暴力。“我是第一批在舞台上毁坏乐器的人之一，”拉蒙特·杨夸耀道。“我在基督教青年会烧了一把小提琴，人们高喊着‘烧死作曲家！’之类的话。”正如这些话所言，乐器在某种程度上是音乐家的替代品，而乐器的仪式性毁坏对观众有着强烈的影响。早在1956年，几乎就在摇滚乐诞生之际，一位表演者在《劳伦斯·韦尔克秀》（一部专门讲述甜蜜的电视连续剧）中模仿猫王埃尔维斯·普雷斯利。一位为感伤的老前辈创作音乐的男子，将一把原声吉他砸在膝盖上。但没过多久，真正的摇滚明星就明白了这种举动的价值。人们经常讲述这样一个故事：杰瑞·李·刘易斯在1958年的一场音乐会上，因为不得不担任查克·贝里的领奏而恼怒不已，将打火机油倒在钢琴上并点燃了它——与此同时，他还在演奏着查克·贝里的热门歌曲《火球》。据说，观众当时已经失控，警察竭力将他们挡在舞台外，但最终还是选择了替身牺牲。这件事真的发生过吗？多年来，刘易斯有时否认此事，有时又证实。在摇滚乐的神话中，这几乎无关紧要。当好莱坞根据刘易斯的生平拍摄一部电影——1989年的传记片《火球》时，燃烧的钢琴成为了影片的亮点。这就是摇滚明星应该有的表演方式，如果这件事没有发生，我们就必须假装它发生了^。2

The sacrificial imperative becomes most clear in the ritualistic destruction of musical instruments at moments of calculated frenzy during performances. Rock didn’t invent this spectacle, but quickly recognized its power as a substitute for actual physical violence directed at the band or audience members. “I was one of the first people to destroy an instrument onstage,” boasts La Monte Young. “I burned a violin at the YMHA, and people were shouting things like ‘Burn the composer!’” As such words make explicit, the instrument is a kind of substitute for the musician, and its ritual destruction has a potent effect on the audience. As early as 1956, virtually at the birth of rock ’n’ roll, a performer parodying Elvis Presley on The Lawrence Welk Show, a TV series specializing in sweet music for sentimental old-timers, smashed an acoustic guitar on his knees. But it didn’t take long for actual rock stars to grasp the value of such gestures. The tale is often told of Jerry Lee Lewis, irritated at having to serve as lead-in act for Chuck Berry at a 1958 concert, pouring lighter fluid on the piano and setting it ablaze—all the while playing his hit song “Great Balls of Fire.” The audience (so the story goes) had been getting out of control, and police were struggling to keep them offstage, but they settled for a sacrificial substitute. Did this really happen? Over the years, Lewis has sometimes denied the incident, and other times confirmed it. In the mythology of rock, that hardly matters. When Hollywood made a movie out of Lewis’s life, the 1989 biopic Great Balls of Fire, the burning piano was the highlight of the film. This is how rock stars are expected to act, and if it didn’t really happen we must pretend that it did.²

新一代摇滚明星无疑都有着破坏乐器的习惯。The Who乐队的彼得·汤森德（Peter Townshend）声称，他开始这种做法纯属偶然。当时，他在一家天花板较低的俱乐部举起吉他时不小心弄坏了吉他，于是一时兴起，将这件已损坏的乐器砸得粉碎。乐队后续演出的观众都期待他再次这样做——这就是仪式的精髓：预期重复——而他也经常做到。如今，他那些破碎的吉他碎片成了收藏品，堪比摇滚界的圣物。但如此震撼人心的表演方式也引发了人们的模仿，很快，The Who乐队的鼓手基思·穆恩（Keith Moon）也加入了进来。当乐队在美国电视台首次亮相时，穆恩的鼓里装满了炸药。据说，爆炸导致汤森德随后出现听力问题，但穆恩在摇滚界的地位却因此上升了一级。当雏鸟乐队（Yardbirds）出现在米开朗基罗·安东尼奥尼1966年执导的电影《放大》（Blow-Up）中时，吉他手杰夫·贝克（Jeff Beck）也利用了同样的时代精神，在镜头前砸毁了自己的吉他，并在乐队演出的俱乐部引发了一场骚乱。大约在同一时间，奇想乐队（Kinks）在威尔士的一场演唱会上发生了一场舞台斗殴，鼓手米克·艾沃里（Mick Avory）用鼓踏板猛击吉他手戴夫·戴维斯（Dave Davies），戴维斯最终被送进了医院，而接下来的三天，艾沃里一直在躲避警察的追捕。直到今天，乐队的歌迷们还在喋喋不休地谈论这场“卡迪夫的争吵”。

With the next generation of rock stars, there could be no doubt about their instrument-destroying rituals. Peter Townshend of The Who claimed that he started this practice by happenstance. He accidentally cracked his guitar when lifting it up at a club with a low ceiling, then decided on the spur of the moment to smash the now damaged instrument to pieces. Audiences at the band’s follow-up gigs expected him to do it again—that’s the essence of ritual: anticipated repetition—and he frequently obliged. The broken bits of his guitars are now collectors’ items, the rock equivalent of saints’ relics. But such a powerful routine invited imitation, and soon The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, got into the act. When the band made its US television debut, Moon packed his drum kit with explosives. By some accounts, the resulting blow-up caused Townshend’s subsequent hearing problems, but Moon moved up a rung in the rock pantheon. When the Yardbirds appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, the guitarist Jeff Beck tapped into the same zeitgeist, destroying his guitar on camera and causing a riot at the club where the band is playing. Around this same time, the Kinks actually got into an onstage fight during a concert in Wales when drummer Mick Avory pummeled guitarist Dave Davies with a drum pedal—Davies ended up in the hospital, and Avory spent the next three days hiding from the police. Even today, fans of the band talk in breathless terms about the “tiff in Cardiff.”

令人惊讶的是，许多摇滚艺术家的标志性照片都捕捉到了他们破坏行为的瞬间。1967 年，吉米·亨德里克斯在蒙特雷流行音乐节上点燃了他的吉他，这场煽动性的（字面意思）表演不仅帮助他的职业生涯一飞冲天，而且被纪念为摇滚乐的一个决定性时刻。燃烧的照片鲜明地强调了事件的仪式性——亨德里克斯跪在火焰上，举起双手，似乎在向摇滚之神祈祷——这张照片两次出现在《滚石》杂志的封面上。但当《Q》杂志评选出有史以来最佳摇滚照片时，亨德里克斯败给了《伦敦呼唤》的封面图片，该图片显示冲撞乐队成员保罗·西蒙在纽约帕拉丁剧院的舞台上砸碎他的芬达精密贝斯——这张照片现在显眼地陈列在摇滚名人堂那把破碎的乐器旁边。

It’s surprising how many of the iconic photos of rock artists capture them in the act of destruction. When Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, this incendiary (literally) performance not only helped launch his career into the stratosphere, but got commemorated as a defining rock moment. The photo of the burning, which starkly emphasizes the ritualistic nature of the incident—Hendrix is on his knees over the flames, raising his hands, seemingly in a kind of invocation to the gods of rock—would appear twice on the cover of Rolling Stone. But when Q magazine picked the best rock ’n’ roll photo of all time, Hendrix lost out to the cover image from London Calling, which shows Paul Simonon of the Clash smashing his Fender Precision Bass on the stage of the Palladium in New York—a photograph now prominently displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next to the busted instrument.

摇滚乐手们不仅会破坏物品，还会互相破坏，甚至（常常）会破坏自己，这足以写成一本书。随着时间的推移，仪式化的摇滚暴力超越了演唱会舞台，延伸到了其他各种场合。摇滚乐手们因破坏酒店房间而声名鹊起，几乎成了老生常谈。2010年，《卫报》甚至刊登了一篇题为《为什么摇滚明星不再破坏酒店房间了？》的文章，怀旧地哀叹吉他英雄们在墙上喷漆、把电视扔出窗外、在沙发上呕吐的时代。然而，即使到了20世纪60年代末，这种仪式性破坏的恶性循环似乎（并非双关语）已经逐渐消退。流传着这样一个故事：海滩男孩乐队的缪斯女神布莱恩·威尔逊在录制未完成的专辑《微笑》时，决定纵火，最终失控。为了增强当时的真实感，他向乐队成员分发了红色的消防员头盔。这次录音简直是一场惨败，但与此同时，另一个谣言开始流传，说布莱恩·威尔逊最终烧毁了歌曲的磁带，这又是多么巧合啊，后来这个谣言被驳斥了。仅仅删除磁带几乎不可能对真正的摇滚乐迷来说已经足够好了——音乐必须作为燔祭来奉献^。3

You could devote a whole book to rock musicians destroying things, as well as each other, and (too often) themselves. Over time, the concept of ritualized rock violence went beyond the concert stage into a range of other settings. Rock musicians became so well known for wrecking hotel rooms that this almost turned into a cliché. In 2010, The Guardian even ran an article titled “Why Don’t Rock Stars Trash Hotel Rooms Anymore?”—a nostalgic lament for the days when guitar heroes spray-painted the walls, threw TVs out the window, and puked on the sofa. Yet even by the end of the 1960s, the spiral of ritualistic destruction seemed (no pun intended) to burn itself out. The story circulated of Brian Wilson, presiding muse of the Beach Boys, finally going off the deep end when he decided to start a fire during a recording session for the aborted album Smile. To enhance the realism of the moment, he handed out red firefighter helmets to the band members. The session was a fiasco, but how fitting when another rumor started making the rounds, later discredited, that Brian Wilson eventually set fire to the tapes of the songs. Just erasing a tape would hardly be good enough for a true rock fan—the music must be offered up as a burnt sacrifice.³

这是一本音乐史著作，而非社会学或心理学著作。即便如此，我们仍然值得思考，为什么这个时代的摇滚乐与祭祀仪式如此相似。诚然，歌曲与暴力的联系自古以来就存在，但从1963年约翰·F·肯尼迪遇刺到1972年水门事件之间的动荡时期，似乎将商业音乐推向了未知的危险水域。伟大的祭祀仪式理论家勒内·吉拉尔或许能为此提供解释。他指出，这些仪式，无论是真实的（牺牲一个人或动物）还是仅仅是象征性的（毁掉一把吉他），都具有强大的社会和心理效益。它们通过将暴力集中在一个特殊的受害者身上来化解社会中猖獗的暴力，这些受害者通常是无辜的，在某些情况下甚至被视为英雄或准神，尽管这种特殊地位可能无法使这些替代人物免受嘲弄和嘲讽^。4

This is a book of music history, not sociology or psychology. Even so, it’s worth considering why rock music from this era reveals so many resemblances to sacrificial rituals. It’s true that songs have been connected to violence as far back as we can trace, but there was something about the tumultuous period between the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the Watergate break-in of 1972 that seemed to push commercial music into uncharted, dangerous waters. René Girard, the great theorist of sacrificial rites, may point the way toward an explanation. He notes that these rites, whether real (a human being or animal is sacrificed) or merely symbolic (a guitar is destroyed), impart a powerful social and psychological benefit. They defuse the violence rampant in a society by focusing it on a special victim, usually innocent, and in some instances even treated as a hero or quasi-deity, although this special status may not exempt the proxy figure from mockery and derision.⁴

吉拉德对理想目标的描述与我们在本书中讨论过的音乐革新者的典型特征惊人地吻合：“仪式的牺牲者往往来自既非社群内部亦非外部的群体，而是边缘群体……这种边缘特质对于祭祀的正常进行至关重要。” 被选中承担这一可疑角色的人既受人尊敬，又令人畏惧——有时，由于他们的魅力如此巨大，人们会向他们索要性服务；但有时，他们也会被指控违反禁忌或引导黑暗力量。然而，在他们去世后，社群恢复平静，崇敬几乎完全抹去了所有先前的负面情绪。处于这种崇高地位的音乐明星甚至可能在他们去世后的一周内，看到他们的唱片人气再创新高。曾经是破坏性情绪的避雷针，如今却备受尊崇，与牺牲者相关的遗物被信徒视为珍宝（甚至有人在eBay上购买损坏的吉他碎片）。所有音乐家都应该谨慎地考虑这些问题。是的，你很特别——但是特殊并不总是好事。那些将表演者与观众区分开来的因素，也激起了强烈的情感，既有崇拜的，也有破坏性的。只有在危险过去之后，回想起来，才会有所谓的“圣典”出现^。5

Girard’s description of the ideal target eerily matches the defining characteristics of the musical innovators we have discussed throughout this book: “Ritual victims tend to be drawn from categories that are neither outside nor inside the community, but marginal to it.… This marginal quality is crucial to the proper functioning of the sacrifice.” The individuals chosen for this dubious distinction are both honored and feared—sometimes their sexual favors are sought, so great is their attraction, but in other instances they find themselves accused of violating taboos or channeling dark powers. Yet after their death, and calm returns to the community, veneration almost completely erases all earlier feelings of negativity. Music stars at this exalted level may even see their recordings reach a new peak of popularity in the week following their demise. The previous lightning rod for destructive emotions is now revered, and relics linked to the victim are treated as special objects cherished by devotees (even to the extent of buying bits and pieces of destroyed guitars on eBay). All musicians should consider these matters with some trepidation. Yes, you are special—but special isn’t always a good thing. The very factors that set the performer apart from the audience also stir up powerful emotions both worshipful and destructive. It’s only in retrospect, after the dangers have passed, that canonizations, if any, take place.⁵

参与者或观众几乎通常意识不到任何黑暗冲动的转移；事实上，根据吉拉德的模型，仪式的力量就在于这种意识的缺失。但他也饶有趣味地指出，在政府官员和司法机构受到信任和尊重的社会中，这些仪式的重要性较低——原因很简单，在这些稳定的环境中，个人将暴力（宣战、惩治犯罪等）的垄断权委托给当局，这取代了更传统的攻击性发泄方式。同样，对统治精英失去信任，也会将暴力报复的责任推回个人身上。在这种情况下，或许有必要通过仪式和节日将这种危险的能量引导至类似祭祀的行为，以防止事态失控。那么，我们是否应该感到惊讶，越南战争时期——至少以对政府合法性的丧失信心来衡量，这是二十世纪美国最不稳定的时期——竟然引发了摇滚音乐会作为祭祀仪式的出现？

The participants or audience members are, almost as a rule, unaware that any transference of darker impulses has taken place; in fact, the power of the ritual, according to Girard’s model, depends on this lack of awareness. But in a curious side note, he admits that these rites are less important in societies where government officials and legal institutions are trusted and respected—for the simple reason that individuals in these stable environments delegate to authorities a monopoly on violence (declaring war, punishing crimes, etc.), and this replaces more traditional outlets for aggression. By the same token, a loss of that trust in ruling elites thrusts responsibility for violent reprisals back on the individual. In these contexts, rituals and festivals that channel this dangerous energy in the direction of a quasi-sacrificial act may be necessary to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control. Should we be surprised, then, that the Vietnam era—the most destabilizing period in twentieth-century America, at least when measured in terms of loss of confidence in government legitimacy—should have triggered the emergence of the rock concert as sacrificial rite?

同一时期，美国以外也经历了类似的动荡——想想1968年的巴黎街头骚乱、几个月后苏联坦克开进捷克斯洛伐克、1969年北爱尔兰骚乱、中国的文化大革命，以及世界各地发生的许多其他大规模暴力事件。顺便说一句，吉拉德正是在同一个时期撰写他关于祭祀仪式的开创性著作《暴力与神圣》，该书于1972年出版。他在这本书中没有讨论音乐，但我们或许有理由得出这样的结论：那些让吉拉德意识到他那个时代祭祀危机的事件，也在那个时代的摇滚文化中得到了呼应——摇滚文化以其独特的方式，或许有助于平息当时猖獗的情绪。（值得注意的是，吉拉德将音乐家视为准祭祀受害者的分析，虽然对理解20世纪60年代的摇滚乐特别有帮助，但也可能……）（也适用于其他背景和情况，例如，关于歌剧、吟游诗人表演、儿童歌曲游戏、电视真人秀歌唱比赛、罗伯特约翰逊和传统蓝调、礼拜音乐等。）换句话说，音乐表演所引起的不稳定态度——无论是被舞台上的超级明星激起，还是仅仅是被抢椅子或“伦敦桥倒塌”中的失败方激起——不仅仅是粉丝忠诚度变化无常的标志，而且是仪式的重要组成部分，甚至是团体“发泄”的一种方式。

That same era witnessed a similar destabilization outside the United States—just consider the Parisian street riots of 1968, the Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia a few months later, the 1969 riots in Northern Ireland, the Cultural Revolution in China, and many other incidents of mass violence in various locales. By the way, this was the exact same period when Girard was writing his seminal book on sacrificial rites, Violence and the Sacred, which he published in 1972. He doesn’t deal with music in this work, but we are perhaps justified in concluding that the same events that opened Girard’s eyes to the sacrificial crisis of his time were also echoed in the rock culture of the era—which, in its own distinctive way, may have helped defuse the rampant emotions. (And it’s worth noting that a Girardian analysis of musicians as quasi-sacrificial victims, although especially helpful in grasping 1960s rock, might be applied in other contexts and situations, for example, with regard to opera, minstrelsy, children’s song games, TV reality show singing contests, Robert Johnson and traditional blues, liturgical music, etc.) Put another way, the volatile attitudes evoked by musical performances—whether aroused by a superstar on stage or merely by the losing party in musical chairs or “London Bridge Is Falling Down”—are not just signs of fans’ fickle allegiances, but essential parts of the ritual, and even a way groups ‘let off steam.’

根据吉拉德的理论，祭祀仪式的成功通常取决于它能否遏制社区中猖獗的暴力，并使个人以更平静的心态回归自身关切。这就产生了一个奇特的悖论：同样的仪式事件，既伴随着危险的社会动荡并煽动暴力情绪，又被视为和平与爱的源泉。这是一个奇怪的组合——侵略性与时髦的团结的混合体——但这几乎正是伍德斯托克和 20 世纪 60 年代末其他反主流音乐活动在现代史上留下印记的方式。此外，如果这个假设是正确的，那么在这些仪式之后，更广泛的文化和音乐界都应该失去暴力能量。从这个角度来看，像亨德里克斯点燃他的吉他或基思·穆恩用炸药炸毁他的鼓这样的事件，不仅仅是宣传噱头或取悦观众的滑稽动作；它们更像是具有宣泄作用的强力干预，为参与者提供某种亚里士多德式的情感净化。因此，我们应该预料到，20世纪60年代的骚动之后，在20世纪70年代初会出现一段冷静期。毕竟，这是一场牺牲性危机解决后必然会发生的情况：侵略让位于和解，集体行动被个人主动性所取代。

The success of the sacrificial ritual is typically measured, according to Girard’s theory, by its ability to curtail rampant violence in a community and allow individuals to return in a calmer frame of mind to their own individual concerns. This creates a peculiar paradox: the same ritual event that accompanies a dangerous destabilization of society and stirs up violent emotions is also cherished as a source of peace and love. It’s a strange combination—a hybrid of aggression and groovy togetherness—yet that’s almost exactly how Woodstock and the other counterculture music events of the late 1960s made their mark on modern history. Also, if this hypothesis is correct, both the broader culture and the music scene should lose their violent energies in the aftermath of these rituals. Events such as Hendrix setting fire to his guitar or Keith Moon blowing up his drums with an explosive charge are, from this perspective, much more than publicity stunts or crowd-pleasing antics; they serve rather as potent interventions with cathartic effects, a kind of Aristotelian purging of emotions for those involved. So we should expect that the tumult of the 1960s would be followed by a cooling-off period in the early 1970s. This is, after all, what invariably happens after the resolution of a sacrificial crisis: aggression gives way to conciliation, and collective action is replaced by individual initiatives.

这正是20世纪70年代初音乐界所发生的事情，反主流摇滚乐让位于低调的创作型歌手和不那么激进的流行音乐。 1972年《公告牌》年度热门单曲榜展现了截然不同的音乐格局：前二十名包括韦恩·牛顿的《爸爸，别走得太快》、小萨米·戴维斯的《糖果人》、吉尔伯特·奥沙利文的《再次孤独（自然而然）》以及其他一些甜腻至极的歌曲，在制作过程中丝毫没有损坏任何乐器。并非所有热门歌曲都是听觉上的享受。这个时代也见证了更私密的艺术性在真正的现代吟游诗人作品中的崛起，例如琼尼·米切尔、卡罗尔·金、埃尔顿·约翰、詹姆斯·泰勒、尼克·德雷克、哈里·查平、尼尔·杨、兰迪·纽曼、唐·麦克林、卡特·史蒂文斯、卡莉·西蒙等。但在商业音乐界，这种向更内省、更个人主义的精神的转变随处可见。即使是披头士乐队，其倡导的和平与爱显然也无法弥合他们之间的裂痕，在1970年4月正式宣布解散后，也开始各自发展事业。几乎与此同时，保罗·西蒙与亚特·加芬克尔解除了合作关系——尽管这对二人组刚刚发行了一首关于团结和克服差异的超级热门歌曲，即格莱美获奖金曲《Bridge Over Troubled Water》——两人都加入了日益壮大的个人表演行列。在这个转折点上，即使是一支超级明星乐队也显得过于局限，下一个阶段似乎需要的是导演式的清晰和特权，而不是集体的凝聚力。

And that’s precisely what took place in music during the early 1970s, as counterculture rockers gave way to low-key singer-songwriters and a less aggressive pop sensibility. The year-end Billboard list of top singles in 1972 showcased a very different musical landscape: the top twenty included Wayne Newton’s “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast,” Sammy Davis Jr.’s “The Candy Man,” Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally),” and other examples of sickly sweet fare, with no instruments harmed in the making of these tracks. Not all the hit songs were aural confectionaries. This era also witnessed the ascendancy of a more intimate artistry in the works of true modern troubadours such as Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Elton John, James Taylor, Nick Drake, Harry Chapin, Neil Young, Randy Newman, Don McLean, Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, and others. But the shift to a more introspective, individualistic ethos could be seen everywhere on the commercial music scene. Even the Beatles, whose advocacy of peace and love apparently couldn’t heal their own rifts, were now forging separate careers after their breakup, formally announced in April 1970. Almost at the same moment, Paul Simon dissolved his partnership with Art Garfunkel—although this duo had just released a megahit about togetherness and overcoming differences, the Grammy-winning anthem “Bridge Over Troubled Water”—and both joined the growing ranks of solo acts on the circuit. At this turning point, even a superstar working band seemed too confining, and the next phase seemed to demand the clarity and prerogatives of an auteur, not the coming together of a collective.

黑人音乐也经历了类似的转变。非裔美国商业电台以团体为中心的人声和声、嘟喔普和传统的R&B音乐，如今被更具放克风格的创作型歌手运动所取代。1970年，戴安娜·罗斯退出了至上合唱团，柯蒂斯·梅菲尔德退出了印象合唱团，埃迪·肯德里克斯离开了诱惑合唱团。明星歌手们越来越将乐队视为障碍，渴望在聚光灯下独占一席之地——或许也是为了找个借口，不再与不那么出名的同行分享版税和薪水。1971年，迈克尔·杰克逊以个人艺术家的身份发行了他的第一张专辑（尽管他继续与杰克逊五人组合作演出）。1972年，斯莫基·罗宾逊退出了奇迹合唱团，1974年，斯莱·斯通离开了他的“家庭”乐队，开始以个人身份录制唱片。史蒂夫·旺德将这种盛行的个人主义精神提升到了一个新的高度，他摒弃了摩城唱片公司录音棚里的音乐家和词曲作者，他们伴随他走向成名，并在许多曲目中演奏所有乐器。

Black music was making a similar transition. The group-oriented vocal harmony, doo-wop, and traditional R&B sounds of African American commercial radio were now pushed aside by a funkier variant of the singer-songwriter movement. In 1970, Diana Ross separated from the Supremes, Curtis Mayfield departed from the Impressions, and Eddie Kendricks left the Temptations. Star singers increasingly saw bands as impediments, and now craved a place by themselves in the spotlights—and perhaps an excuse to stop sharing royalties and paychecks with less famous colleagues. In 1971, Michael Jackson released his first music as a solo artist (although he continued to perform with the Jackson 5). In 1972, Smokey Robinson departed from the Miracles, and in 1974, Sly Stone left his “Family” to start recording as a solo act. Stevie Wonder took this prevailing spirit of individualism to the next level, dismissing the Motown label studio musicians and songwriters who had accompanied his rise to fame, and playing all the instruments on many tracks.

独唱艺术家是灵魂乐的新面孔，黑人表演者进入主流Top 40电台也变得前所未有的容易。就在几年前，像艾瑞莎·弗兰克林、妮娜·西蒙妮和詹姆斯·布朗这样才华横溢的黑人艺术家，在试图接触非裔美国人群体以外的受众时，还遭遇了无数障碍。从音乐类型到巡演期间的酒店房间，一切都被划分成黑人和白人的两大类别。但如今，在20世纪70年代音乐界的新风潮面前，传统的市场壁垒正在崩塌。就连BB·金在数十年沉寂于R&B排行榜之后，也凭借《The Thrill Is Gone》（1970）一曲成为跨界热门。摇滚和流行电台也帮助传播了罗伯塔·弗莱克、比尔·威瑟斯、艾萨克·海耶斯、鲍勃·马利、马文·盖伊、米妮·里珀顿以及其他数十位冉冉升起的黑人艺术家的名声。社会在变，音乐也在变。时代精神要求自我表达、抒情和亲密，并打破了以前将商业黑人音乐归类和隔离的许多界限。

Solo artists were the new face of soul music, and never before had it been easier for black performers to cross over into mainstream Top 40 radio. Just a few years earlier, black artists of extraordinary talent, such as Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, and James Brown, had encountered countless obstacles in their attempts to reach audiences outside the African American community. Everything from music genres to hotel rooms on the road had been segregated into separate black and white categories. But now the traditional marketing barriers were collapsing in the face of the new tone of the 1970s scene. Even B. B. King could enjoy a crossover hit with “The Thrill Is Gone” (1970), after decades of relegation to the R&B charts. Rock and pop stations were helping to spread the fame of Roberta Flack, Bill Withers, Isaac Hayes, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Minnie Riperton, and dozens of other rising black artists. Society was changing, and so was the music. The spirit of the age demanded self-expression, lyricism, and intimacy and cut across many boundaries that had previously pigeonholed and ghettoized commercial black music.

一度，乐迷们似乎已经将20世纪60年代那种夸张的激情抛诸脑后——但表象往往具有误导性。在60年代结束之前，性炫耀和暴力再次成为商业音乐界不可回避的两大引力极，这次分别以迪斯科和朋克摇滚的面目出现。很快，嘻哈音乐也加入其中，形成了一个大胆、直面的三巨头，共同推翻了抒情吟游诗人和深情民谣歌手的短暂统治。

For a while, it appeared as if music fans had left the over-the-top intensity of the 1960s behind them—but appearances can be misleading. Before the end of the decade, sexual preening and violence would reemerge as the inescapable gravitational poles of the commercial music scene, manifesting themselves this time in the guise of, respectively, disco and punk rock. And soon hip-hop would join to form a triumvirate of sassy, in-your-face genres that collectively toppled the short-lived reign of lyrical troubadours and soulful balladeers.

正如我们所见，类似的转变在20世纪30年代和50年代就已经发生（无疑更早）。歌迷们似乎渴望颠覆，而当流行音乐的动荡结束后，和平时期只能持续短短几年，观众就会要求一场新的叛乱。回想一下，到了20世纪30年代初，20世纪20年代的热门爵士乐已经失宠，取而代之的是忧郁的情歌和轻快的新奇歌曲。然而，这只是一个短暂的插曲：摇摆时代在后半段将激烈的舞曲带回了主流。在20世纪50年代，这种模式再次出现。这个年代以梦幻般的流行音乐和（再次）新奇歌曲占据榜单主导地位开始，但在后半段，它们被更火辣的舞曲所取代，这次是以早期摇滚乐的名义。20世纪70年代的转变也是如此。摇滚革命之后，一种低调、细致入微的审美在流行音乐中占据了主导地位，作品不足的创作型歌手——他们有时只依靠吉他或钢琴伴奏——赢得了热情的追随者。但是，正如历史的经验教训告诉我们的那样，这种情况不会持续下去。歌迷很快就会要求一些更火辣、更性感、更适合跳舞的音乐。

As we have seen, similar shifts had already taken place during the 1930s and 1950s (and no doubt earlier). It’s almost as if fans crave disruption, and when the upheavals in popular music come to an end, peacetime can only last a few short years before audiences demand a new insurgency. Recall how, by the dawn of the 1930s, the hot jazz of the 1920s had fallen out of favor, replaced by moody torch songs and upbeat novelty numbers. Yet this proved just a passing interlude: the Swing Era brought intense dance music back to the forefront during the second half of the decade. In the 1950s, the pattern repeated. The decade started with dreamy pop music and (again) novelty songs dominating the charts, but they gave way in the second half of the decade to hotter dance music, this time in the guise of early rock ’n’ roll. The transition in the 1970s was the same. After the rock revolution, a low-key, nuanced aesthetic came to the forefront of popular music with the under-produced singer-songwriters—who sometimes relied only on a guitar or piano for accompaniment—and they gained enthusiastic followings. But, as the lessons of history tell us, this could not last. Fans would soon demand something hotter, something sexier, something more danceable.

这种新的舞曲音乐一出现，就有一个新名字：迪斯科。这个名字是法语单词discotheque（迪斯科舞厅）的缩写（该词最初表示唱片收藏），也标志着技术的变革。迪斯科夜生活不需要真正的音乐家，因此标志着与过去的决定性决裂——这种决裂仍然定义着当今的舞蹈场景。经济现实促成了这种转变：聘请音乐家播放舞曲价格不菲，但聘请一位 DJ 以迪斯科形式播放唱片的费用仅为知名乐队的一小部分。然而，新的态度和生活方式也助长了迪斯科文化的兴起。俱乐部里真正的焦点不再是在乐队的舞台上，而是在人群中。在拍摄具有代表性的迪斯科电影《周末夜狂热》（1977 年）时，导演从未考虑过让音乐家加入电影——尽管比吉斯乐队的伴奏舞曲成为了有史以来最畅销的配乐专辑，并在排行榜上位居榜首超过四个月。现实生活中的迪斯科舞厅也一样：参加者互相打量，评头论足，并推进浪漫——或者仅仅是性——的征服。音乐一直与性联系在一起，可以追溯到古代的生育仪式，但音乐行业从未如此公开地干预促成关系。（我最近听到一位忧郁的舞厅老板抱怨互联网毁了他的……生意兴隆，不是因为流媒体音乐，而是因为现在网上安排性约会变得轻而易举。去迪斯科是为了上床？不，现在他们有app了。迪斯科就像Tinder出现之前的Tinder。

When it arrived, this new dance music came with a new name: disco. The name, a shortening of the term discothèque (a French word originally signifying a collection of phonograph records), also indicated a change in the technology. Disco nightlife didn’t need actual musicians, and thus signaled a decisive break with the past—one that still defines the dance scene of the current day. Economic reality facilitated this shift: hiring musicians to play dance music was expensive, but a DJ spinning records in a disco format cost a fraction of a name band. Yet new attitudes and lifestyles also contributed to the rising disco culture. The real action in the club was no longer on the bandstand but out in the crowd. When they made the definitive disco movie, Saturday Night Fever (1977), the director never considered putting the musicians in the film—even though the Bee Gees’ accompanying dance music generated the biggest-selling soundtrack album of all time, sitting on top of the chart for more than four months. Real-life discos were no different: attendees were checking each other out, assessing dance moves, and advancing romantic—or merely sexual—conquests. Music has always been connected with sex, as far back as the fertility rites of yore, but never had the music business been so openly interventionist in facilitating liaisons. (I recently heard one melancholy dance club owner complaining that the Internet had destroyed his business, not because of streaming music, but due to the ease with which sexual hookups can now be arranged online. Go to the disco to get laid? Nah, they got an app for that now.) Disco was Tinder before there was Tinder.

音乐本身极其简单。节奏几乎与每分钟120拍相差无几。即使依靠真人鼓手演奏，节奏也必须保持近乎机器般的可预测性。花哨的和弦变化或编曲完全没有必要，甚至不会让人分心。至于歌词，一句口号就足够了，通常不过是对舞者的陈词滥调：“你应该跳舞”、“站起来，舞动起来”、“跳到地板上”、“摇动你的臀部”、“今晚放松下来”之类的迪斯科约会建议。老派乐迷经常嘲笑这些千篇一律的曲目，而乐手们则哀叹现场乐队被廉价的迪斯科形式所取代。 20世纪70年代，对迪斯科音乐的强烈反对逐渐兴起，并在1979年7月芝加哥科米斯基公园举行的臭名昭著的“迪斯科爆破之夜”上达到顶峰。当时，这场活动正值棒球双赛的间隙。组织者预计会有两万名观众，但实际上只有五万人到场，观看了一大箱迪斯科唱片爆炸的场景。这场爆炸是古老祭祀仪式的新变种，参与者被它深深地激怒，他们冲进场地，直到防暴警察出动才离开。

The music itself could hardly have been simpler. The tempos rarely deviated much from 120 beats per minute. Even when the music relied on a real flesh-and-blood drummer, the beat had to maintain a quasi-machine-like predictability. Fancy chord changes or arrangements were unnecessary, even distractions. As for lyrics, a slogan could suffice, often little more than a banal exhortation to the dancers: “You Should Be Dancing,” “Get Up and Boogie,” “Get on the Floor,” “Shake Your Booty,” “Get Down Tonight,” and other mantras of disco date advice. Old-school music fans often ridiculed the formulaic tracks, and musicians lamented the replacement of live bands with cheaper disco formats. A backlash gradually emerged over the course of the 1970s, reaching its peak at the infamous Disco Demolition Night held at Comiskey Park in Chicago between the games of a July 1979 baseball double-header. Organizers anticipated a crowd of twenty thousand, but fifty thousand people actually showed up to watch the explosion of a huge crate of disco records. Attendees were so roused by the detonation—a new variant of the old sacrificial ritual—that they stormed the field and wouldn’t leave until riot police intervened.

大约在同一时期，兰德公司正在开发一种基于生活方式类别的创新营销理论。广告商长期以来一直使用人口统计数据来定位他们的广告活动，但他们关注的是收入水平、年龄和传统的性别角色假设。兰德公司的一位先驱告诉我，生活方式营销的突破性时刻出现在美林证券借鉴这家智库的建议制作“看好美国”电视广告时。广告中出现了真正的公牛形象，但场景往往格格不入——最著名的一则广告就是在一家真正的瓷器店里出现了一头公牛。生活方式分析表明，一个有影响力的消费者群体将自己视为独立思考的个人主义者，并以领先于人群为荣；他们希望将自己视为领导者，而不是追随者。就像营销活动中那头自由奔放的公牛一样。美林证券随后的成功证明，企业可以通过先了解消费者心理，然后再瞄准他们的钱包来赢得他们的信任。随着时间的推移，几乎每个一流的消费品牌都会尝试识别生活方式的触发因素和线索，但这种转变发展缓慢。旧习难改，尤其是在大公司。

Around this same time, the Rand Corporation was developing an innovative new theory of marketing based on lifestyle categories. Advertisers had long used demographic data to target their campaigns, but they had focused on income levels, age, and traditional assumptions about gender roles. One of the Rand pioneers told me that the breakthrough moment for lifestyle marketing came when Merrill Lynch relied on the think tank’s advice in crafting its “bullish on America” TV commercials, with their images of actual bulls, often in incongruous settings—the most famous featured the proverbial bull in an actual china shop. Lifestyle analysis showed that an influential group of consumers saw themselves as individualists who thought for themselves and took pride in getting ahead of the crowd; they wanted to view themselves as leaders, not followers, just like the free-spirited bull in the marketing campaign. Merrill Lynch’s ensuing success proved that companies could gain consumers’ trust by tapping into their psyches before targeting their wallets. In time, almost every first-rate consumer brand would try to identify lifestyle triggers and cues, but this shift was slow in developing. Old habits die hard, especially in big corporations.

但音乐行业并非如此。唱片公司早在生活方式营销尚未被正式命名之前就已洞悉其精髓。商业音乐类型的创造和培育——至少自20世纪20年代以来一直是唱片公司的一项重要工作——几乎从一开始就本质上是一项生活方式定义的任务。人们对乡村音乐、爵士乐、布鲁斯、古典音乐以及其他音乐类型的忠诚度，往往更多地取决于歌迷的自我形象、理想生活和抱负，而非人口普查数据中那些可量化的客观事实。摇滚乐革命到来后，唱片公司很快意识到，这一音乐类型也主要受生活方式因素驱动——即使音乐行业有时在运用这一洞见时显得笨拙，但它仍然比那些对地位和收入有着简单概念的汽车和家电制造商领先数光年。因此，我们不应感到惊讶，新兴的生活方式，尤其是与性解放和非传统性别角色相关的生活方式，早在其他任何重要经济领域的企业敢于承认它们之前，就在音乐行业找到了平台。这并不是因为唱片公司特别进步，甚至不是因为他们预见到了即将到来的变化。相反，业内精明的管理者大多只是让路，让音乐人引领潮流。行业高管们已经认识到（通常是通过错误和误判，以惨痛的方式）他们的利润取决于表演者和观众之间那种充满张力、有时甚至神秘莫测的心灵关系。即使他们不理解这种关系，他们也不会去干预。宽容只是一种精明的商业行为。

But not in the music business. Record labels knew about lifestyle marketing long before it had a name. The creation and cultivation of commercial music genres—a major preoccupation of record labels at least since the 1920s—had essentially been a task of lifestyle definition almost from the start. Loyalty to country and western, jazz and blues, classical music, and other categories often depended more on a fan’s self-image, fantasy life, and aspirational projections than on the brute measurable facts of census data. When the rock revolution arrived, labels quickly realized that this genre, too, was driven largely by lifestyle considerations—and even if the industry was sometimes clumsy in applying this insight, it was still light-years ahead of the automobile and appliance manufacturers, with their simple-minded notions of status and income. So we shouldn’t be surprised that emerging lifestyles, especially those related to sexual liberation and nontraditional gender roles, found a platform in the music business long before corporations in any other significant sector of the economy dared to acknowledge them. This isn’t because record labels were especially progressive, or even because they anticipated the changes to come. Rather, the astute managers in the industry mostly just got out of the way and let musicians lead the charge. Industry execs had learned (often the hard way, through mistakes and miscalculations) that their profits depended on the charged and sometimes mysterious psychic relationship between performer and audience. Even if they didn’t understand it, they didn’t mess with it. Tolerance was simply a smart business practice.

这就是为什么那些所谓的音乐界梦想家的故事往往出奇地平庸。切斯兄弟在创立芝加哥布鲁斯音乐的品牌之前，曾负责分销酒类，这一转变或许可以被看作是简单地更换了一家公司。另一种麻醉剂。早在汤姆·帕克上校引领埃尔维斯·普雷斯利走上成名之路之前，他曾在狂欢节上做过叫卖者。石墙酒吧是20世纪60年代末同性恋权益运动的焦点，酒吧里的三位黑手党投资者一心想赚钱，对警察和城市法规毫不尊重。这些先驱者之所以成功，是因为他们不懂企业营销，却对人性有着敏锐的洞察力，而哈佛商学院并没有教过这种东西。

That’s why stories about the so-called visionaries of the music industry are often surprisingly banal. The Chess brothers distributed liquor before starting the label that launched Chicago blues, a shift that might be viewed as the simple substitution of one intoxicant for another. Long before Colonel Tom Parker steered Elvis Presley onto his path to fame, he had worked as a carnival barker. The three Mafia investors in the Stonewall Inn, a focal point of the gay rights movement in the late 1960s, wanted to make a buck, and didn’t have much respect for police and city regulations. These pioneers succeeded because they knew nothing about corporate marketing, but had a shrewd grasp of human nature not taught at Harvard Business School.

所以，至少在 20 世纪 70 年代另类生活方式成为音乐界关注的焦点时，商业利益没有介入。没有任何经纪人能够炮制出大卫·鲍伊在 1972 年打造的“齐格星尘”形象——它将异装打扮、性别流动性、关于外星人的科幻概念以及强烈的摇摆节拍融合在一起，形成了舞台上前所未有的效果。但回过头来看，鲍伊也是一位杰出的有远见的社会学家，他在生活方式的变化成为主流之前就对其进行了描绘。《洛基恐怖秀》也是如此，它最初是 1973 年的一部舞台音乐剧，1975 年被改编成一部低成本电影。当时，很少有人关注它，很多关注它的人都认为它是一次失败的坎普式幽默表演。一位评论员将这部电影描述为“巴斯比伯克利音乐剧和变装版科学怪人的结合体”。《新闻周刊》用三个形容词概括了当时的主流观点：“毫无品味、情节空洞、毫无意义”。然而，这部电影很快就开始在艺术影院的午夜场次上映，并展现出惊人的持久力。它颂扬了自由的性别认同，并颠覆了刻板印象——主流伴侣如今成了格格不入者，而局外人则设定了规范——这部看似轻松的音乐喜剧却蕴含着深刻的洞见，让人们得以一窥未来性角色的形态。其他新兴音乐团体，无论是像乡村人乐队（Village People）这样的迪斯科艺术家，还是像纽约娃娃乐队（New York Dolls）这样的硬摇滚乐手，都证实了这是一场真正的运动。音乐曾是第一个拥抱种族融合的领域，如今它正以同样的方式在一个新的领域前进，通过广播提醒主流社会，即将走出他们社区阴影的变化即将到来^。6

So at least the business interests didn’t interfere when alternative lifestyles moved to the forefront of the music scene in the 1970s. No manager could have ever concocted David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona of 1972—which combined crossdressing, gender fluidity, science fiction concepts about extraterrestrials, and a strong ass-shaking backbeat into something never seen before onstage. But in retrospect, Bowie, too, stands out as a far-sighted sociologist, mapping lifestyle changes long before they entered the mainstream. The same is true of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which started as a stage musical in 1973 and was turned into a low-budget movie in 1975. At the time, few paid much attention, and many who did dismissed The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a failed exercise in camp humor. One commentator described the film as “a cross between a Busby Berkeley musical and a drag version of Frankenstein.” Newsweek summed up the prevailing view in a three-adjective dismissal: “tasteless, plotless and pointless.” Yet the film soon started appearing at art-house cinemas in midnight screenings, where it showed remarkable staying power. In its celebration of freeform gender identities and reversal of stereotypes—the mainstream couple now emerges as the misfits, while outsiders set the norms—this seemingly lightweight musical comedy proved positively oracular, offering a glimpse into the shape of sexual personae to come. Other rising music acts, whether disco artists, such as the Village People, or hard rockers in the mold of the New York Dolls, confirmed that this was a genuine movement. Music had been the first field to embrace racial integration, and it was now doing the same in a new sphere, alerting mainstream society via the airwaves to changes that would soon come out of the shadows in their communities.⁶

当时，人们很容易低估这类音乐中的颠覆性元素。许多媒体将其称为华丽摇滚或浮华摇滚，这些名字让整个运动看起来像是一种姿态，一个舞台搭建物，与陈词滥调的灯光秀和道具没什么不同，这些陈词滥调的摇滚乐队用来为翻新的电台热门歌曲的票价上涨辩护。埃尔顿·约翰可能会穿着任何衣服出现在舞台上，从迪士尼公主裙到大黄蜂服装。乡村人民乐队穿上最平庸的职业的日常制服（牛仔、警察、建筑工人），不知何故设法将他们变成同性恋文化的原型。弗雷迪·默丘里在舞台上采用了一系列令人眼花缭乱的戏剧姿态——在他的最后一场音乐会上，他扮演君主，戴着金色王冠，穿着皇室长袍演唱“天佑女王”。另一个极端是乐队Kiss，他们擅长打造令人毛骨悚然的小丑妆容，这简直就像低成本黑白恐怖片的风格。许多旁观者或许会将这些举动视为噱头或玩笑，而非激进社会运动的先兆。但这些摇滚乐手在灌输包容和多元化理念方面所做的贡献，或许比那个时代的任何立法者都要大。音乐再次展现了其捍卫人权和拓展个人自主权的潜能。

It was all too easy, at the time, to underestimate the subversive elements in much of this music. Many in the media labeled it as glam rock or glitz rock, names that made the whole movement seem like a pose, a stage construct not much different from the clichéd light shows and props that tired rock bands were using to justify rising ticket prices for warmed-over radio hits. Elton John might show up onstage wearing anything from a Disney princess dress to a bumblebee costume. The Village People put on the workaday uniforms of the most banal professions (cowboy, cop, construction worker), somehow managing to turn them into gay cultural archetypes. Freddie Mercury adopted a dazzling range of theatrical stances onstage—at his last concert, he took on the persona of a monarch, wearing a golden crown and royal robe while performing “God Save the Queen.” At the other extreme, the band Kiss specialized in creepy clown makeup suitable for a low-budget black-and-white horror film. Many onlookers may have dismissed these moves as stunts or jokes, not the first stirrings of a radical social movement. But these rockers probably did more to instill notions of tolerance and diversity than any legislators of the era. Here again, music showed its hidden power to champion human rights and expand personal autonomy.

与此同时，其他形式的音乐反叛也撼动了文化版图。它们吸引了那些渴望比迪斯科更前卫音乐的乐迷。重金属乐队一度以其超响、超激进的音乐风格，成为更具对抗性摇滚风格的旗手。这些乐队的基调和粗犷程度各不相同，鉴赏家最终得以在数十个子流派之间做出细微的区分，其中包括厄运金属（节奏较慢，令人绝望，如同一段通往地狱的阴郁之旅）、黑金属（节奏快速，人声尖锐，有时带有法西斯暗示）、海盗金属（硬核，但偶尔带有船夫号子的音调）、工业金属（如果工厂里的工作伴随着吉他riff，听起来会是什么样子）、撒旦金属（用于崇拜黑魔王的下流配乐）以及基督教金属（用于征服黑魔王的圣洁配乐）等等。随着这个习语的演变，甚至乐队的名字也可以作为这就像某种警告，或者至少是保证让那些不熟悉金属乐的人远离——尤其是在当地音乐厅的招牌宣布炭疽乐队、黑死病乐队或胴体乐队即将到来的时候（我们甚至还没讲完金属乐的基础知识呢）。你会买票吗？或者设置隔离区吗？即使是这些简短的描述也表明，这种音乐的意图非常沉重，就像舞台上耸立的巨大扬声器一样，将金属乐的声音震向挤满忠实信徒的礼堂。

At this same juncture, other forms of musical rebellion were shaking up the cultural landscape. They appealed to fans who craved something edgier than disco. For a time, heavy metal bands, with their ultra-loud, ultra-aggressive music, emerged as standard-bearers for a more confrontational rock stance. These varied in tone and degree of gnarliness, and connoisseurs would eventually make fine distinctions between dozens of subgenres, including doom metal (slower, despairing, a gloomy trip down the river to hell), black metal (fast, with shrieking vocals, sometimes flavored with fascist allusions), pirate metal (hardass, but with occasional sea shanty overtones), industrial metal (what your factory job would sound like if it came with guitar riffs), satanic metal (a nasty soundtrack for worshipping the dark lord), and Christian metal (a saintly soundtrack for subduing the dark lord), among others. As the idiom evolved, even the name of a band could serve as a kind of warning, or at least a guarantee that the uninitiated would stay away—especially when the marquee at the local concert hall announced the arrival of Anthrax, Black Death, or Carcass (and we haven’t even gone beyond the ABCs of metaldom). Do you buy a ticket or set up a quarantine zone? As even these thumbnail descriptions indicate, this music came with agendas as ponderous as the huge loudspeakers that loomed onstage, blasting metal sounds to auditoriums packed with true believers.

金属乐在巅峰时期名副其实。它对父母和权威人物嗤之以鼻。它的领军人物精通乐器，有时甚至能达到一种原始粗俗的精湛技艺，让观众兴奋不已。至少，那些全神贯注地聆听黑色安息日、AC/DC、金属乐队和其他明星金属乐队演唱会的人，可以感受到最高水平的戏剧性，身临其境地感受表演艺术。

At its best, metal music lived up to its billing. It snubbed its nose at parents and authority figures. Its leading exponents knew their instruments, and sometimes even achieved a raw and vulgar virtuosity that exhilarated audiences. At a minimum, those in rapt attendance at concerts by Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Metallica, and other star metal acts were assured of immersive performance art of the highest level of theatricality.

即便如此，金属乐的崛起也无法掩盖20世纪70年代中期摇滚乐逐渐失去优势的普遍感觉。就在几年前，摇滚乐曾掀起一场惊天动地的社会运动，动员了数百万年轻人，并引导他们呼吁彻底改变整个社会。金属乐似乎依然保持着这种激进的立场，但如今只面向一小部分乐迷——他们是边缘群体中的边缘群体，内讧不断，不断遭到谴责，他们中间那些装腔作势的人，那些模仿者根本不配成为真正的金属乐迷。如果说摇滚乐是新一代走上街头的音乐，那么金属乐则是那些在卧室里生闷气、心怀不满的青少年的音乐类型。他们的影响力主要局限于用锁着的门后传出的喧闹音乐来烦扰父母。最终，流行文化会把金属乐迷变成笑柄，在《瘪四与大头蛋》和《反斗智多星》等喜剧中戏仿他们与生俱来的狂热。但早在无知的金属乐迷成为一种模因之前，主流文化就已经决定可以安全地忽略这些滑稽行为。如果摇滚乐希望保持其作为永久革命音乐的地位，它需要某种更强大、更叛逆的东西，一种比奥兹·奥斯本和Kiss小丑妆更吓人、更不矫揉造作的生活方式。

Even so, the rise of metal couldn’t hide the pervasive sense that rock was losing its edge during the middle years of the 1970s. Just a few years before, rock ’n’ roll had stirred up an earthshaking social movement, mobilizing millions of young people and channeling their demands for radical change in society at large. Metal music seemed to maintain that radical stance, but now only for a much smaller niche of devotees—fringes within fringes beset by infighting and constant denunciations of poseurs in their midst, wannabes who didn’t deserve true metal acolyte status. If rock was seen as the music of a new generation taking to the streets, metal was the genre of disaffected teens sulking in their bedrooms. Their impact was mostly restricted to annoying parents with the loud music coming from behind a locked door. Eventually pop culture would turn metalheads into jokes, parodying their in-bred zeal in comedies such as Beavis and Butt-Head and Wayne’s World. But long before clueless metal fans became a meme, the mainstream culture had decided it could safely ignore these antics. If rock hoped to maintain its status as the music of permanent revolution, it needed something stronger, even more defiant, a lifestyle formula scarier and less hokey than Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss clown makeup.

当朋克摇滚以其血腥的荣耀登场时，乐迷们要么爱它，要么恨它，但没有人怀疑它危险而动荡。20世纪70年代末80年代初，我住在英国，晚上是爵士乐手，白天是哲学研究生，沉浸在自己的小众文化体验中，但即使是我也不得不关注朋克精神。当朋克团伙出现在我家附近时，他们想让人们感受到他们的存在是扰乱和威胁。我曾经卷入朋克和警察的对峙，当时骚乱已经发生，我庆幸自己在事态失控之前逃脱了。就在几年前，卡罗尔·金和詹姆斯·泰勒称霸音乐榜的时候，没有人会想到会出现一种新的音乐流派，能够引发这样的骚乱。相比之下，就连我珍爱的爵士乐也显得黯然失色。

When punk rock arrived on the scene, in all its bloody glory, fans loved it or hated it, but no one doubted that this was something dangerous and volatile. I was living in England in the late 1970s and early 1980s, immersed in my own niche culture experiences as jazz musician (by night) and philosophy grad student (by day), but even I had to pay attention to the punk ethos. When punk gangs showed up in my neighborhood, they wanted people to feel their presence as disruptive and threatening. I once got caught up in a standoff between punks and police, the stage was set for a riot, and I counted my blessings that I escaped before things got out of control. Just a few years before, when Carole King and James Taylor had ruled the charts, no one suspected that a new music genre would come along that could mobilize something like this. Even my cherished jazz seemed a pale thing by comparison.

音乐作家杰瑞·波特伍德甚至声称，在推倒柏林墙方面，朋克摇滚比政客们更值得称赞——如果你不去研究他收集的文件，这种观点或许会显得像朋克的吹嘘。这些文件展现了东德秘密警察对这场反叛青年运动的疯狂痴迷。“当我阅读史塔西的档案时，我简直不敢相信他们竟然如此偏执，”波特伍德解释道。“你越深入研究，就越意识到，嗯，实际上，他们是对的。这对独裁政权构成了真正的威胁，因为他们试图掌控自己生活中的基本决定。”然而，朋克只不过是在延续着我们追溯到数千年前的悠久传统，将新的演唱方式与个人自主权的扩张以及对当权者的威胁联系起来。朋克正是凭借这种联系而蓬勃发展（也有一些因此消亡）^。7

Music writer Jerry Portwood has gone so far as to claim that punk rock deserves more credit than politicians for bringing down the Berlin Wall—a view that may seem like mere punk braggadocio until you examine the documents he has gathered. They show the maniacal obsession of East German secret police with this rebellious youth movement. “I couldn’t believe, when I was reading the Stasi files, the level of paranoia,” Portwood explains. “The deeper you go into it, you realize, well actually, they were right. It was a genuine threat to the dictatorship because they were trying to take control of the basic decisions in their lives.” Yet punk was simply fulfilling the time-honored tradition, one we have now traced back thousands of years, linking new ways of singing with the expansion of personal autonomy and threats to those in positions of authority. Punks thrived (and some died) by that linkage.⁷

这场新的颠覆性运动几乎质疑了摇滚界的所有核心价值观。此前，乐队力求获得热门歌曲，并通过电台播放量和电视曝光量来衡量其成功，而这些衡量标准曾是猫王、披头士乐队和其他早期摇滚精英的标尺。如今，最高成就是一首电台不敢播放的歌曲。当英国广播公司（BBC）全面禁播性手枪乐队的《天佑女王》时——考虑到一些民众的呼吁，这算得上是温和的回应。乐队成员公开绞死——销量飙升。尽管许多零售商拒绝进货这首单曲，但每天仍有15万张被狂热的歌迷抢购一空。过去，乐队看到自己的名字登上排行榜都会庆祝，但性手枪乐队却拥有更令人惊叹的成就：英国官方热门榜单上本应列出他们歌曲的地方却空白一片。即使是崇拜撒旦的摇滚乐手，也从未激起过如此程度的制度化厌恶。

This new subversive movement called into question almost every core value of the rock world. Previously, bands strived for hits and judged their success by radio airplay and TV appearances, those measuring rods that had validated the stardom of Elvis, the Beatles, and other rock elites of earlier days. Now, the highest achievement was a song that radio stations were afraid to play. When the BBC imposed a total ban on the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”—a mild response when you consider that some citizens were calling for a public hanging of band members—sales took off. Even though many retailers refused to stock the single, 150,000 copies per day got snatched off the shelves by eager fans. In the past, bands celebrated when they saw their name on the charts, but the Sex Pistols could boast of an even more amazing accomplishment: the official UK hits chart put a blank entry where their song should have been listed. Even Satan-worshiping rockers had never inspired that degree of institutionalized loathing.

在过去十年中，顶尖摇滚乐队将音乐造诣提升了数个等级。金属乐队以其速弹（shutter）为荣，而像Yes和Emerson, Lake & Palmer这样的前卫摇滚乐队则将音乐学院培养出的精湛技艺融入到他们充满爆发力的表演中。然而，新一代朋克明星们不仅拒绝了这一切，反而骄傲地炫耀着自己练习的匮乏和对音乐的无知。“我不会调吉他，只会E和弦，”雷蒙斯乐队的迪迪·雷蒙夸耀道，“没人比我强。”保罗·西蒙加入冲撞乐队（Clash）时，并没有演奏任何乐器，贝斯部分都是通过死记硬背的模仿来学习的。但这并没有阻止哥伦比亚广播公司（CBS）唱片公司在冲撞乐队仅仅演出了几场（其中大部分是暖场演出）之后，就与他们签下了价值10万英镑的合约。当时，无数的模仿乐队都在模仿性手枪乐队，但他们的贝斯手席德·维瑟斯（Sid Vicious）甚至连乐队首张专辑里最简单的部分都应付不过来——乐队成员史蒂夫·琼斯（Steve Jones）不得不演奏那些非常基础的贝斯线。毕竟，琼斯在性手枪乐队成立前已经有三个月的吉他演奏经验，以朋克的标准来看，他已经算是技艺精湛的专业人士了。（有些粉丝为维瑟斯辩解说，贝斯并非他最擅长的乐器——它远不如注射器贝斯。）⁸

During the previous decade, leading rock bands had raised the standards of musicianship by several rungs. Metal bands took pride in their shredding, and progressive rock groups, such as Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, incorporated virtuoso techniques from the music conservatory into their explosive performances. But the new generation of punk stars not only rejected all that, but strutted in pride over how little they practiced, how much they didn’t know about their craft. “I had no idea how to tune a guitar and only knew the E chord,” boasted Dee Dee Ramone of the Ramones. “No one else was any better.” When Paul Simonon joined the Clash, he didn’t play an instrument, and learned his bass guitar parts through rote imitation. That didn’t stop CBS Records from signing the band to a £100,000 contract after the Clash had only played a few gigs, most of them as a warm-up act. Countless copycat bands were emulating the Sex Pistols at this juncture, but their bassist, Sid Vicious, couldn’t even handle the simple parts on the group’s debut album—bandmate Steve Jones had to play those very rudimentary bass lines. Jones, after all, had three months of actual experience with a guitar before the Sex Pistols formed, making him a polished pro by punk standards. (In Vicious’s defense, some of his fans quipped that bass wasn’t his preferred instrument—it ran a distant second to the syringe.)⁸

但当摇滚乐迷真正渴望的是一个牺牲品时，谁还需要音乐才能呢？在20世纪70年代末的音乐界，没有人比席德·维瑟斯（Sid Vicious，本名约翰·西蒙·里奇，1957年出生于伦敦）更适合扮演这个角色了，他是朋克叛逆的代表人物。公开绞刑是不必要的；这一点任何人都看得出来。维瑟斯一心想着自我毁灭。以下是成长经历的缩略图：1977 年 4 月，维瑟斯从阿什福德拘留中心获释后不久，就与性手枪乐队一起进行了他的第一次演出。他已经因在俱乐部的暴力行为而出名——他最近的一次公开愤怒导致一名年轻女子的一只眼睛失明，在随后的拘留期间，维瑟斯通过阅读一本关于查尔斯·曼森的书来娱乐自己。在接下来的六个月里，性手枪乐队被两家唱片公司解雇，因在国家电视台上说脏话而引起争议，在英国大部分地区被禁，并激怒了几乎所有当权者，从媒体评论员到主要政客，他们都陷入了厌恶的境地。他们的第一张专辑在 10 月发行，但性手枪乐队已经是他们那一代最臭名昭著的摇滚乐队。

But who needed musicianship when what rock fans really craved was a sacrificial victim? And no one in the music world of the late 1970s was better suited to play that role than Sid Vicious (born John Simon Ritchie in London, 1957), the poster child for punk rebellion. A public hanging wouldn’t be necessary; anyone could see that. Vicious was hell-bent on self-destruction. Here’s a thumbnail CV of his formative years: Vicious played his first gig with the Sex Pistols in April 1977, shortly after his release from the Ashford Remand Centre. He already had a reputation for violent outbursts in clubs—his latest moment of public rage had left a young woman blinded in one eye, and Vicious entertained himself during the resulting detention by reading a book about Charles Manson. Over the next six months, the Sex Pistols got fired from two record labels, created a controversy by swearing on national TV, were banned in much of Britain, and provoked almost the entire establishment, from media pundits to leading politicians, into paroxysms of loathing. Their first album came out in October, but the Sex Pistols were already the most notorious rock band of their generation.

乐队日益增长的名气丝毫没有软化维瑟斯或其公众形象。性手枪乐队的表演不太像摇滚音乐会，而更像是欧里庇得斯的《酒神的女祭司》中狂热的邪教仪式。通常，歌迷到场是为了表示崇拜和掌声，但朋克观众似乎同样喜欢嘲讽和攻击台上的英雄。然而，性手枪乐队享受着他们所激发的危险能量，而且公平地说，他们煽动了大部分针对他们的暴力行为。当乐队在圣安东尼奥进行他们命运多舛的美国巡演时，歌迷投掷啤酒罐和其他物品——这现在成了朋克表演仪式的一部分——维瑟斯与一名嘲讽的歌迷发生了争执，他挥舞着吉他冲向违规者。他只是擦伤了一名巡演工作人员的肩膀，但很快另一个故事就传开了，像野火一样在朋克中蔓延开来：谣言说，维舍斯用他的十磅重的芬达贝斯砸碎了一名粉丝的头。在达拉斯，事情变得更加奇怪。性手枪乐队将他们的朋克表演带到了一个以前由杰克·鲁比 (Jack Ruby) 管理的乡村音乐舞厅（没错，就是那个枪杀李·哈维·奥斯瓦尔德的杰克·鲁比，而后者又枪杀了约翰·F·肯尼迪总统），粉丝们在这里向舞台扔西红柿、啤酒罐、瓶子和其他物品。维舍斯表演时浑身是血，可能由多种原因造成，包括用剃须刀和破碎的喜力啤酒瓶自残。活动照片显示，他的胸口刻着“给我一个解决办法”几个字。

The band’s rising fame did nothing to soften either Vicious or his public image. Performances by the Sex Pistols were less like rock concerts and more akin to frenzied cult rituals out of Euripides’s Bacchae. Usually, fans show up to adulate and applaud, but the punk audience seemed just as likely to taunt and assault the heroes onstage. Yet the Sex Pistols relished the dangerous energy they roused, and by any fair assessment, they instigated much of the violence unleashed upon them. When the band performed in San Antonio during their ill-fated US tour, fans threw beer cans and other objects—this was now a part of the punk performance ritual—and Vicious got into an altercation with a taunting fan, swinging his guitar at the transgressor. He only grazed a roadie’s shoulder, yet soon another story was making the rounds, spreading like wildfire from punk to punk: Vicious, the rumor went, had bashed in a fan’s head with his ten-pound Fender bass. In Dallas, things got even stranger. The Sex Pistols brought their punk act to a country music ballroom previously managed by Jack Ruby (yes, that Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, who in turn shot President John F. Kennedy), and here the fans threw tomatoes, beer cans, bottles, and other objects at the stage. Vicious played covered in his own blood, probably from multiple causes, including self-inflicted injuries with a razor and a broken Heineken bottle. Photos of the event show the words “Gimme a Fix” carved into his chest.

1978年1月14日，性手枪乐队抵达旧金山，这是他们美国巡演的最后一站。当时，有人期待着他们能吸引到比之前在巴吞鲁日、达拉斯和塔尔萨等地更高端的观众。然而，在温特兰——我上大学时曾在那里听过深受乐迷喜爱的音乐，我母亲也曾在上一代人之前来过这里滑冰，那时那里有真正的溜冰场，一个真正的温特兰——情况肯定大不相同，不是吗？大批媒体人士到场，其中许多人是从洛杉矶或其他地方赶来，来评估这支炙手可热的新乐队。但他们从一开始就能看出，这绝非一场典型的摇滚巡演。在达拉斯，席德·维瑟斯用“你们这帮牛仔基佬”来迎接观众；在旧金山，约翰尼·罗顿对乐迷说的第一句话就是“你们真是一群酷儿”。从那以后，情况变得更糟了。朋克精神的权威记录者格雷尔·马库斯描述了当时的场景：

When the band showed up in San Francisco on January 14, 1978, for the final stop on its US tour, there were some expectations that the Sex Pistols would attract a more sophisticated audience than at its previous stops in Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Tulsa. Here at Winterland—where I went to hear fan-friendly music as a college student and my mother had visited a generation before for skating when it was home to an actual ice rink, a true Winter-land—things would be different, no? Scads of media people were in attendance, many them traveling on assignment from Los Angeles or elsewhere, to assess the hot new band. But from the start they could tell this would not be a typical rock road show. In Dallas, Sid Vicious had greeted the audience with “Ya cowboy faggots”; in San Francisco, Johnny Rotten’s first words to the fans were “You’re a queer lot.” Things got worse from there. Greil Marcus, the leading chronicler of the punk ethos, describes the scene:

这支乐队永远不会再在音乐会上演出，而且，说实话，很难想象性手枪乐队或任何表演者如何能够将摇滚乐中祭祀暴力的仪式进一步推行，但又不至于沦为纯粹的暴乱和狂欢。即便如此，性手枪传奇乐队在舞台之外的尾声远比他们在巡演中所做的一切更加残酷。在乐队最后一次接受美国电台采访时，席德·维瑟斯甚至透露了这段后记。当被问及未来会怎样时，他预测自己可能会在两年内去世。事实证明，这是一个乐观的估计。乐队的演出大约用了两年时间的一半。

This band would never perform again in concert, and, in truth, it’s hard to imagine how the Sex Pistols, or any performers, could take the rock ritual of sacrificial violence any further without devolving into pure riot and orgy. Even so, the offstage coda to the Sex Pistols legend is far more brutal than anything they did on tour. In the band’s last US radio interview, Sid Vicious even gave a glimpse of that postscript. Asked about what the future held in store, he predicted he would probably be dead within two years. That proved an optimistic assessment. It took roughly half that time.

接下来的一年足以写一本书，但这里只是个大概的梗概：10月，维瑟斯被控用刀谋杀女友南希·斯庞根（Nancy Spungen）。10天后，他试图自杀，用一个坏掉的灯泡割腕自杀。在贝尔维尤医院（Bellevue Hospital）的监禁期间，他试图跳窗。12月，这位朋克摇滚歌手因袭击歌手帕蒂·史密斯（Patti Smith）的兄弟托德·史密斯（Todd Smith）而被捕，并被关押在赖克斯岛（Riker's Island）接受拘留和戒毒。1979年2月2日，西德·维瑟斯获释后数小时，因过量服用海洛因而死亡。

You could write a book about the following year, but here is the thumbnail sketch: In October, Vicious would get charged with murdering his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, with a knife. Ten days later, he attempted suicide, slitting his wrist with a broken lightbulb. During the resulting confinement at Bellevue Hospital, he tried to jump out a window. In December, the punk rocker was arrested for assaulting Todd Smith, brother of singer Patti Smith, and placed in Riker’s Island for detention and detox. Within hours of his release, on February 2, 1979, Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose.

他已经二十一岁了。令人惊讶的是他能坚持这么久。

He was twenty-one years old. And it was surprising he had lasted that long.

二十七

27

说唱歌手和技术官僚

Rappers and Technocrats

Sid Vicious 属于我们这一代人；我出生时只比他晚几周。整个朋克精神是由我的同辈人构建的，我们这些人来得太晚，错过了猫王和披头士的时代，但却在这场承诺将一切推向极限的新奇观中占据了前排座位。即便如此，性手枪乐队的世界观与我相去甚远，我很难找到任何共同点。他们的世界观很多地方令人毛骨悚然，有时甚至令人反感。尽管如此，我承认这支乐队短暂的职业生涯既让我着迷，也让我感到自责。Sid Vicious & Co. 以一种令人不安的方式，给了摇滚乐迷他们想要的东西——毕竟，这不正是艺人成功的定义吗？

Sid Vicious belongs to my generation; I was born just a few weeks after him. The whole punk ethos was constructed by my contemporaries, those of us who arrived too late for Elvis and the Beatles, but had front-row seats for this new spectacle that promised to push everything to the limit. Even so, the Sex Pistols’ worldview is so far afield from my own that I struggle to find any common ground. Much of it is horrific, sometimes repulsive. Nonetheless, I admit I am riveted and chastened by the band’s abbreviated career. In a disquieting sort of way, Sid Vicious & Co. gave rock fans exactly what they wanted—and, after all, isn’t that the definition of success for an entertainer?

一句有用的格言：如果你真的想理解一种新型流行音乐，就应该把目光从舞台移开，凝视观众。性手枪乐队让我们深刻地体会到了这些旁观者。或许，摇滚乐在其最极端的表现形式下，与昔日的角斗士游戏，或如今的斗牛、斗鸡和其他血腥场面并无太大区别。我希望我能将这一切——阿尔塔蒙特乐队、查尔斯·曼森、席德与南希、马克·大卫·查普曼、摇滚乐手英年早逝、歌迷失控等等——视为一连串的邪恶。巧合，古怪而不可预测的命运的安排。但我无法做到。性手枪乐队身上有一种确定性、揭示性、令人深感不安的东西，是后来摇滚明星的任何作品都无法抹去或超越的。虽然说摇滚乐甚至朋克摇滚在《冬日乐园》和《切尔西酒店》中终结是错误的，但实际上并没有合适的再演绎，也没有什么能将这种音乐类型的反叛精神发扬得更远。始于猫王埃尔维斯·普雷斯利，终于席德·维瑟斯。

A useful dictum: If you really want to understand a new type of popular music, turn away from the stage and gaze at the audience. The Sex Pistols taught us much about these onlookers. Perhaps rock, in its most extreme manifestations, is really not so different from the gladiator games of yore, or the bullfights and cockfights and other blood spectacles of today. I wish I could dismiss all this—Altamont, Charles Manson, Sid and Nancy, Mark David Chapman, rockers dying young, fans out of control, etc.—as a string of evil coincidences, the dispensation of a quirky and unpredictable fate. But I can’t. There was something definitive and revealing and deeply unsettling about the Sex Pistols that nothing in later installments of rock stardom will ever either erase or surpass. And though it would be wrong to say that rock or even punk rock ended at Winterland and Hotel Chelsea, there’s really no suitable encore, nothing that can take the genre’s ethos of rebellion any further. What started with Elvis Presley ended with Sid Vicious.

那么，我们是否应该对20世纪80年代以与20世纪30年代、50年代和70年代初期同样的紧缩政策开局感到惊讶？企业化浪潮的兴起在这一转变中扮演了关键角色，因为从乐队发掘到广播节目，该行业的方方面面都变得越来越精简和微观管理。当然，这就像试图将闪电装进瓶子里。你真的能把摇滚乐的持续革命简化为一种企业商业模式吗？唱片公司的老板们愿意投入巨资去探究答案。1981年，唱片销量达到10亿张，资金充裕。但那个时代最大的两个变化在当时很容易被忽视：1980年音频CD的发明和1981年MTV的推出。这两件事一开始看起来都微不足道，但它们却在接下来的十年里彻底改变了音乐界。

Should we be surprised, then, that the 1980s started with the same kind of retrenching that had previously occurred at the dawn of the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1970s? The rising tides of corporatization played a key part in this shift, as every aspect of the industry, from band discovery to radio formats, became increasingly streamlined and micromanaged. Of course, this was like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Could you really reduce the permanent revolution of rock to a corporate business model? The music bosses were willing to spend the money to find out. One billion albums were sold in 1981, and there was plenty of cash to go around. But the two biggest changes of that era were easy to miss at the time: the invention of the audio compact disc in 1980 and the launch of MTV in 1981. Both seemed like small and insignificant events at the outset, but they would change everything in music during the course of the decade.

那里隐藏着一个更黑暗的真相。在那个时代，音乐技术的发展速度超过了音乐风格本身。在接下来的几十年里，歌曲的变化速度如同冰川般缓慢。三十年后Lady Gaga的歌曲，对于80年代的麦当娜粉丝来说，会非常熟悉。里根时代的嘻哈歌手会心照不宣地效仿新千年说唱歌手的许多节奏和态度。80年代后的爵士乐越来越沉迷于自身的传统，对尊严的追求常常与对过去的模仿混淆。如今的摇滚乐主要是一种怀旧的生意。乡村电台则在马的一生中（大约25到30年，供您参考）都没有发明出新的比喻。在一些商业流派中，过去的同一首歌会被采样——或者，以一种数量惊人的案件，实际上是抄袭——而且是被后来的热门歌曲创作者抄袭的。马文·盖伊于1984年去世，但他在一代人之后从版权诉讼中赚到的钱比他生前赚到的还要多。旧的就是新的，新的就是旧的。

A darker truth was hidden there. This was the moment when music technology started evolving faster than musical styles themselves. The songs would change at a glacier’s pace over the next several decades. A Lady Gaga song of thirty years later would be quite recognizable to a Madonna fan of the 1980s. The hip-hoppers of the Reagan era would nod knowingly at many of the beats and attitudes of new-millennium rappers. Jazz after the 1980s became increasingly obsessed with its own heritage, and the quest for respectability often got confused with mimicry of the past. Rock today is mostly a nostalgia business. Country radio, for its part, hasn’t invented a new trope in a horse’s lifetime (roughly twenty-five to thirty years, for your information). In several commercial genres, the exact same song from yesteryear would get sampled—or, in a surprising number of cases, actually plagiarized—by the hit-makers of a future day. Marvin Gaye died in 1984, but he would earn more from copyright lawsuits a generation later than he ever did during his lifetime. What’s old is new, and what’s new is old.

这些歌曲是永恒的，其艺术性一如既往地突破了世代障碍。但对于来自 20 世纪 80 年代的时间旅行者来说，互联网时代的音乐技术是无法辨认的。流媒体、YouTube、点对点共享、种子、手机或手表中的音乐、互联网上的音乐博客、算法生成的播放列表——每一项都会让那个时代的乐迷感到困惑，即使所有这些技术生成的歌曲听起来似曾相识。想到真正的音乐革命越来越多地发生在公司办公室和硅谷研究部门，而不是密西西比的酒吧和利物浦的俱乐部，真是令人沮丧。这是 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代的持久遗产，但当时谁敢想象呢？

The songs are timeless, and artistry, now as always, defies generational barriers. But the technology of Internet-age music would be unrecognizable to a time traveler from the 1980s. Streaming, YouTube, peer-to-peer sharing, torrents, music from your phone or wristwatch, music blogs on the Internet, algorithm-generated playlists—each and every one of these would mystify a fan from that earlier era, even if the songs that all this tech delivers sound vaguely familiar. How dispiriting to consider that the real revolutions in music would increasingly take place in corporate offices and Silicon Valley research departments, not in Mississippi juke-joints and Liverpool clubs. That is the lasting legacy of the 1980s and 1990s, but who dared imagine it at the time?

当时盛行的精神其实是一种无限自由和无限可能的感觉。朋克突破了极限，克服了审查和刑事起诉的威胁。事后看来，两家名字平淡无奇的公司（A&M 和 EMI）在性手枪乐队（Sex Pistols）尚未达到巅峰时就将其解散，看起来就像是思想狭隘的傻瓜。到了 20 世纪 80 年代，唱片公司终于吸取了教训：只要能卖出去，什么都行。即使朋克精神在 20 世纪 80 年代初失去了一些优势，但随着各种独立音乐、后朋克和新浪潮音乐的兴起，创造力依然蓬勃发展。事实上，这些音乐大多拒绝被贴上标签或归类。传声头像乐队（Talking Heads）及其明星歌手大卫·伯恩（David Byrne）被认为是新浪潮音乐的先驱，但他们将超现实的表演艺术风格与舞曲节奏相结合，加上近乎自嘲的古怪舞台姿态，使得这支乐队难以轻易被归类。英国新星斯汀（Sting）和他的强力三人组合警察乐队（Police）也获得了类似的新浪潮标签，但如果你听他的音乐足够久，就能听到从雷鬼到爵士的各种元素，所有这些元素都流畅而锐利，并且在光鲜的包装下，隐藏着一种非常不合时宜的音乐技巧和诗意表达的忠诚。布鲁斯·斯普林斯汀的录音生涯始于创作型歌手的时代，他的制作人约翰·哈蒙德曾希望将他培养为鲍勃·迪伦的接班人——在 1972 年的一次采访中，他将斯普林斯汀描述为一位“年轻的民谣歌手”。但斯普林斯汀有不同的计划，并在 20 世纪 80 年代初打造了一种民粹主义的竞技场摇滚之声，以前所未有的方式融合了美国工人阶级的民俗、进步的社会评论和老派摇滚乐的比喻。没有剧本。那个时代的精神足够多元，可以容纳埃尔维斯·科斯特洛的后朋克歌曲创作、辛迪·劳帕的艺术合成流行乐、王子的雌雄同体的新放克、金发女郎的闪亮舞曲、莫里西和他的乐队史密斯的黑暗忧郁，以及无数其他独特的音乐自我表达方式。

The prevailing ethos back then was, in fact, a sense of unlimited freedom and unconstrained possibilities. Punk had pushed the limits, and it had overcome threats of censorship and criminal prosecution. With the benefit of hindsight, the two corporate entities with bland alphabet-soup names (A&M and EMI) that had dropped the Sex Pistols before their apotheosis looked like close-minded fools. By the 1980s, record companies had finally learned their lesson: anything goes so long as it sells. Even as the punk ethos lost some of its edge in the early 1980s, creativity flourished with the rise of various indie, post-punk, and New Wave sounds. In truth, much of this music resisted labels or pigeonholes. Talking Heads and their star singer, David Byrne, are considered pioneers of New Wave music, but with their mix of a surreal performance art stance with danceable beats, along with an eccentric onstage posturing bordering on self-parody, the band defies easy categorization. The British rising star Sting and his power trio the Police earned a similar New Wave label, but if you listen long enough to his music you hear bits of everything from reggae to jazz, all streamlined and laser sharp, and with a very unfashionable allegiance to musicianship and poetic expression that bristle inside the slick packaging. Bruce Springsteen had launched his recording career during the era of singer-songwriters, and his producer, John Hammond, had hoped to groom him as a successor to Bob Dylan—in an interview from 1972, he described the artist as a “young folksinger.” But Springsteen had different plans and in the early 1980s was crafting a populist arena rock sound that blended working-class Americana, progressive social commentary, and old-school rock ’n’ roll tropes in hitherto unheard ways. There was no playbook. The spirit of the age was diverse enough to embrace the post-punk songwriting of Elvis Costello, the artsy synthpop of Cyndi Lauper, the androgynous neo-funk of Prince, the glittery dance grooves of Blondie, the dark melancholy of Morrissey and his band the Smiths, and countless other unique takes on musical self-expression.

然而，随着时间的推移，音乐视频技术的兴起以及MTV日益增长的影响力改写了唱片业的规则。围绕一首歌曲制作的音乐短片的概念已经存在了几十年。自从有声电影诞生以来，好莱坞就一直在尝试这种模式，但缺乏定论或一致性。各大公司曾多次尝试推出将电影和音乐融为一体的点唱机，但Cinebox和Scopitone推出时所承诺的宏伟计划从未兑现。随后，有线电视在20世纪80年代出现，为新一代音乐视频创造了完美的平台。到80年代末，美国有线电视用户已超过五千万，近八十个有线电视频道竞相争夺廉价节目以填补播出时间。还有什么比音乐视频更实惠呢？尤其是在唱片公司承担制作成本的情况下？MTV——其名称最初是音乐电视的缩写——充分利用了这一新形势。

Yet, as the decade went on, the emerging technology of the music video and the growing influence of MTV rewrote the rules of the record business. The notion of short music-driven films built around a single song had been around for decades. Hollywood had tinkered with this format since the beginning of talking movies, but without much conviction or consistency. Companies made various attempts to introduce jukeboxes that combined film and music, but the grand promises that accompanied the launch of the Cinebox and the Scopitone never were fulfilled. Then cable television came along in the 1980s, creating the perfect platform for a new generation of music videos. By the close of the decade, more than fifty million US households were subscribing to cable, and almost eighty cable channels were competing for cheap programming to fill up airtime. What could be more affordable than music videos, especially if the record labels covered the cost of production? MTV—its name originally served as an abbreviation for music television—took full advantage of this new state of affairs.

这对商业音乐产业的影响非同寻常。几乎从一开始，有线电视普及率高的地区的唱片店就被迫出售MTV艺人的音乐，甚至包括当时几乎没有电台播放的乐队。MTV可以凭借一己之力，将之前名不见经传的乐队，例如Men at Work或Human League，打造成一支重量级乐队。到1983年，甚至好莱坞也开始注意到这一点。派拉蒙影业决定将电影《闪舞》的部分内容剪辑成适合MTV播放的素材，以提高其知名度。许多影评人对这部电影大加批评，但MTV帮助《闪舞》成为当年票房第三高的电影。此后，好莱坞电影公司开始制作定制音乐视频来宣传他们的新电影，即使这些视频缺乏合适的场景。但最大的受益者是那些有远见的艺术家，他们抓住了新的现实：在这个新的技术平台上，歌曲不再是独立的。成功需要过去唱片公司很少咨询的专家和专业人士的支持：舞蹈家、编舞、摄影师、化妆师、服装设计师等等。在过去，像罗伯特·约翰逊或鲍勃·迪伦这样的艺术家，只需一把吉他就能征服音乐界。现在，需要一整支支持团队。

The effect on the commercial music business was extraordinary. Almost from the start, record stores in areas with high cable penetration were forced to stock music by MTV acts, even bands that were getting almost no radio airplay at the time. The network could single-handedly turn a previously little-known band, such as Men at Work or the Human League, into a major act. By 1983, even Hollywood started to take notice. Paramount decided to boost the visibility of the film Flashdance by editing portions of the movie into cable-ready material for MTV. Many critics panned the film, but MTV helped turn Flashdance into the third highest-grossing movie of the year. In the aftermath, Hollywood studios began creating custom-made music videos to promote their new films, even if they lacked suitable scenes. But the biggest beneficiaries were forward-looking artists who grasped the new reality: namely, that songs were no longer self-sufficient on this new tech platform. Success required support from experts and specialists rarely consulted by record labels in the past: dancers, choreographers, cinematographers, makeup artists, costume designers, and the like. In an earlier day, a solitary artist with a guitar, a Robert Johnson or Bob Dylan, could conquer the music world. Now, a whole support crew was required.

迈克尔·杰克逊和麦当娜两位引领这十年的标志性艺术家，以先见之明，预见了二十世纪后期观众参与的规则。就在几年前，如果有人认为掌握流畅的舞步对他们的职业生涯至关重要，摇滚巨星们一定会嗤之以鼻。但这些新时代的MTV明星们却把更多的时间花在练习舞蹈上，而不是钻研乐理，身边还配备了专业的舞蹈团队，确保每一个动作和姿态都像百老汇的节目或巴斯比·伯克利的演出一样精雕细琢、排练有方。1983年，杰克逊凭借其MV《颤栗》（Thriller）将这种美学理念提升到了一个新的高度，创作了一部14分钟的剧情驱动型舞蹈盛宴，成为当时最具创新性的短片。尽管这部影片未能获得奥斯卡提名——这或许是一个令人费解的疏忽，但或许也体现了好莱坞对来自MTV的竞争的担忧——但观众的反响如此热烈，以至于MTV开始每小时播放两次《颤栗》。然而，它对唱片销量的影响更为显著。《颤栗》成为史上最畅销的专辑：它催生了七首热门单曲，赢得了八项格莱美奖，并确立了如今被誉为“流行之王”的迈克尔·杰克逊作为他那个时代最杰出的男歌手的地位。但此前从未有过如此多的辅助人才成就了一张热门专辑。或许无人能超越杰克逊的舞台表现力和舞步，但同样，也没有其他歌手拥有能与他匹敌的支持团队。其中包括传奇制作人昆西·琼斯、电影导演约翰·兰迪斯、编舞迈克尔·彼得斯、奥斯卡获奖化妆师里克·贝克，以及哥伦比亚广播公司、MTV、百事可乐等公司的联合营销力量。

The defining artists of the decade, Michael Jackson and Madonna, anticipated the late twentieth-century rules of audience engagement with prescient clarity. Just a few years before, rock megastars would have laughed in derision had anyone suggested that knowing slick dance steps would be essential to their career. But these new-era MTV stars spent more time working on their dance routines than studying music theory, and they surrounded themselves with teams of dance professionals who could ensure that every move and gesture was as well crafted and rehearsed as those in a Broadway routine or Busby Berkeley spectacle. With his 1983 music video “Thriller,” Jackson pushed this aesthetic vision to the next level, creating a fourteen-minute plot-driven dance extravaganza that stands out as the most innovative short film of the period. Although it failed to achieve an Oscar nomination—a puzzling oversight, but perhaps a sign of Hollywood’s fear of competition from MTV—audience response was so enthusiastic that MTV started playing “Thriller” twice every hour. Yet the impact on record sales was still more dramatic. Thriller became the best-selling album of all time: it generated seven hit singles, won eight Grammy awards, and established Michael Jackson, now dubbed the King of Pop, as the leading male music star of his era. But never before had so much ancillary talent gone into making a hit record. Perhaps no one could surpass Jackson’s stage presence and dance steps, but by the same token, no other singer had a support team that could match his. It included legendary producer Quincy Jones, film director John Landis, choreographer Michael Peters, Oscar-winning makeup expert Rick Baker, and the combined marketing muscle of CBS, MTV, and Pepsi, among others.

当今，乐坛超级巨星的地位前所未有地依赖于挖掘歌曲的电影化潜力。麦当娜在她的音乐视频《Vogue》中列举了一长串时尚前辈，她们几乎都是好莱坞女演员——丽塔·海华斯、珍·哈露、金格尔·罗杰斯和其他电影皇后。没有一位音乐家上榜，原因也不难理解。麦当娜与这些银幕明星的共同点比与过去的明星歌手更多。她对玛丽莲·梦露的痴迷是她职业生涯中反复出现的主题——甚至有人声称她与小约翰·F·肯尼迪约会是为了模仿梦露与其父亲的关系。她的《Material Girl》视频充满了对梦露在电影《绅士爱美人》中演唱的“钻石是女孩最好的朋友”的影射，从礼服到珠宝，无不如此。在1987年的电影《谁是那个女孩》中，麦当娜甚至还化了一颗假美人痣，与梦露嘴唇上方的美人痣相呼应。尽管麦当娜曾多次尝试以好莱坞票房收入的名义成名，但大部分都以失败告终，但音乐销售仍然是她职业生涯的主要动力。她的歌曲是精心制作的载体，由舞曲节奏、铿锵有力的旋律和俏皮的歌词推动。但音乐本身如今只是更大整体中的一个组成部分。即使是奢华的音乐视频似乎也屈从于塑造个人形象的更大使命。从某种程度上来说，这里的市场产品既不是专辑，也不是巡回演唱会，而是麦当娜本人。

Superstardom in music now relied, to an unprecedented degree, on tapping into the cinematic potential of songs. When Madonna reeled off a list of stylish predecessors in her music video “Vogue,” almost all of them were Hollywood actresses—Rita Hayworth, Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, and other movie queens. No musician made the list, and it’s not hard to see why. Madonna had more in common with these screen stars than with the celebrity singers of the past. Her obsession with Marilyn Monroe would be a recurring theme in her career—some even claim she dated John F. Kennedy Jr. for the purpose of emulating Monroe’s involvement with his father. Her video for “Material Girl” is filled with allusions to Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” performance from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, down to the dress and jewelry. In the 1987 movie Who’s That Girl, Madonna even gets made up with a fake beauty mark to match the one Marilyn had above her lips. Selling music was still the main thrust of Madonna’s career—despite many attempts, most of them unsuccessful, to gain renown as a Hollywood box-office draw—and her songs were well-crafted vehicles, propelled by danceable beats, insistent melodies, and saucy lyrics. But the music itself was now only one ingredient in a larger whole. Even the lavish music videos seemed subservient to the larger mission of crafting a persona. To some extent, the marketable product here was neither an album nor a concert tour, but Madonna herself.

整个商业音乐界都适应了这些新的职业成功标准。视觉冲击力至关重要，并开辟了新的职业道路，例如，宝拉·阿卜杜勒（Paula Abdul）从洛杉矶湖人队的啦啦队员转型为音乐录影带明星，凡妮莎·威廉姆斯（Vanessa Williams）也从美国小姐的选美冠军转型为从一位参赛选手到R&B天后。奥莉维亚·纽顿-约翰凭借一首夸张的歌曲《Physical》成功重振事业：这支展现性感身材的MV与MTV的模式完美契合，而当时许多其他成名明星尚未适应这个新平台。同样，普林斯在电影《紫雨》中轻松转型为电影明星，这似乎是他此前在引人入胜的音乐录影带中已有作品的延伸。考虑到专辑《紫雨》的收入甚至超过了电影本身，你甚至可能会认为后者是一部精心制作的音乐录影带，旨在推销唱片。

The whole commercial music scene adapted to these new metrics of career success. Visual impact was everything, and opened up new career paths that allowed, for example, Paula Abdul to make the transition from cheerleader for the Los Angeles Lakers to music video star, and Vanessa Williams to go from Miss America beauty contestant to R&B diva. Olivia Newton-John managed to rejuvenate her career with the campy song “Physical”: the flesh-strutting video was perfectly suited to the MTV format at a time when many other established stars hadn’t adapted to the new platform. By the same token, Prince could shift easily into the role of movie star in the film Purple Rain, and it seemed like an extension of what he had already been doing in his compelling music videos. When you consider that the album Purple Rain generated more revenue than the movie, you might even be tempted to view the latter as an elaborate music video designed to sell recordings.

视觉媒体在音乐界的这种新的主导地位并非没有付出沉重的代价。许多原本才华横溢的音乐人感到被这个追求特定外貌和个性的行业拒之门外。我有时会想，如果迈克尔·杰克逊的职业生涯没有与视频形式如此紧密地联系在一起，他是否会在早期发展出他对整形手术近乎病态的痴迷。杰克逊深知外貌对他的名声有多么重要，他可能觉得每次接受整形手术都是在保护自己的商业帝国。但最大的风险在于，在MTV的影响下，音乐行业日益公司化。唱片公司为这些如今奢华的视频买单，并面临着一个残酷的现实：推出一位新的超级巨星的演出动辄就要花费一百万美元甚至更多。在这个充斥着大制作的时代，那些叛逆的、边缘化的音乐家——自古以来就是音乐的命脉——还能脱颖而出吗？还是唱片公司会变得更加谨慎，追逐成熟的模式，同时避开那些敢于冒险、标新立异的艺术家？

This new dominance of a visual medium in the world of music did not come without a heavy cost. Many otherwise talented musicians felt shut out by an industry that craved a certain look and persona. I sometimes wonder whether Michael Jackson, in an earlier day, would have developed his quasi-pathological obsession with plastic surgery if his own career hadn’t been so closely linked with the video format. Jackson understood full well how important his look was to his renown, and probably felt he was protecting his business empire every time he went under the knife. But the biggest risk here was the increasingly corporatized nature of the music business under the influence of MTV. Record labels paid the bills for these now lavish videos and faced the harsh truth that launching a new superstar act might easily require a million dollars or more. Could renegade and outsider musicians—the lifeblood of music since ancient times—still rise to the top in this world of big-budget productions? Or would record labels grow more cautious, chasing after proven formulas while avoiding risk-taking and unconventional artists?

MTV 则希望展现出进步和前沿的形象，但现实是，它是一家由中年、唯利是图的高管管理的数十亿美元企业。当你的现金流利润率只有 40%，年增长率高达 50%，而且收入来源于创造利润，而不是改善音乐生态系统时，很难保持前卫和创新精神。这些股东权益的管理者毫不犹豫地封禁视频、强制删除令人反感的内容，或者采取为了取悦主流观众，他们不惜一切代价。他们喜欢性感的歌手，在麦当娜成功之后，他们拥抱了惠特尼·休斯顿、玛丽亚·凯莉和其他迷人的表演者。但并非所有性感视频都能得到他们的认可。里克·詹姆斯的《Superfreak》或莫特利·克鲁的《Girls, Girls, Girls》都被砍掉了。雪儿的《If I Could Turn Back Time》只允许在晚上9点后在MTV上播放，电视台最终强制剪辑，以便雪儿在有线电视观众面前少一些露骨的镜头。大约在同一时间，更具冒险精神的歌迷开始谈论他们对“独立摇滚”或“独立音乐”的偏好——这些术语直到20世纪80年代末才出现，但在几年之内就发展成为拥有大量追随者的可定义的流派。这种转变表明，人们越来越意识到，各大唱片公司及其在MTV的伙伴已经变得过于公司化，在推广令人兴奋的新人才方面缺乏技巧。

MTV, for its part, wanted to appear progressive and cutting-edge, but the reality was that it was a multibillion-dollar enterprise run by middle-aged, bottom-line-driven executives. It’s hard to stay edgy and experimental when you are generating 40 percent cash-flow margins, growing at 50 percent per year, and getting compensated for delivering profits, not for enhancing the music ecosystem. These stewards of shareholder equity had no qualms about banning videos, forcing the removal of objectionable content, or doing whatever else it took to please a mainstream audience. They loved sexy singers, and after Madonna’s success they embraced Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and other attractive performers. But not all sexy videos met with their approval. Rick James’s “Superfreak,” or Motely Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” got axed. Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” was allowed on MTV only after 9:00 p.m., and the network eventually forced edits so that Cher shared a little less flesh with cable viewers. Around this same time, more adventurous fans started talking about their preference for “indie rock” or “indie music”—those terms didn’t exist until the late 1980s, but within a few years emerged as definable genres with large followings. This shift suggested a growing sense that the major labels and their friends at MTV had become too corporatized and less skilled at promoting exciting new talent.

垃圾摇滚的兴起暴露了新秩序中的所有裂痕。这场运动于20世纪80年代在西雅图兴起，并于20世纪90年代初随着涅槃乐队、珍珠酱乐队、声音花园乐队和其他志同道合的乐队的巨大成功而成为主流。涅槃乐队的专辑《Nevermind》最初是由一支尚未证明实力的乐队以低成本发行的。该乐队之前的全长专辑《Bleach》在发行之初甚至没有上榜，尽管它在大学电台获得了一些关注。《Nevermind》的初始预算为6.5万美元，但最终花费了12万美元，以当时的标准来看，这仍然不算贵。乐队的新唱片公司是格芬唱片公司的子公司，他们看好这张成品专辑的前景，并希望它能卖出25万张，这对于一支不落俗套、不落俗套、不接受MTV式宣传的乐队来说，是一个重大的成功。但听众似乎恰恰渴望这种不那么精致、更紧迫的声音。销量一路飙升，首先是在太平洋西北地区，随后蔓延至其他市场。发行三个月后，《Nevermind》就取代了迈克尔·杰克逊，夺得了公告牌排行榜的冠军宝座。这张专辑最终在全球售出3000万张，对许多听众来说，它成为了那个时代的标志性音乐。珍珠酱乐队的《Ten》几乎在同一时期发行，在涅槃乐队的跨界成功之后，也获得了一批乐迷的青睐，最终售出了1000万张专辑。一场炙手可热的摇滚运动再次兴起。虽然这一趋势在音乐产业主要城市中心之外有所兴起，但就连越来越多地在洛杉矶和纽约办公室发号施令的会计师和律师也能够理解这些数字的意义。

The rise of grunge music exposed all the fault lines in the new order of things. This movement emerged in Seattle in the 1980s and went mainstream in the early 1990s with the tremendous success of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and other like-minded bands. Nirvana’s album Nevermind had started life as a low-budget affair by a still unproven band. The group’s previous full-length album Bleach hadn’t even made the charts on its initial release, although it had gained some traction with college radio stations. The initial budget for Nevermind was $65,000, but it ran over and eventually cost $120,000, still modest by the standards of the day. The band’s new label, a subsidiary of Geffen Records, saw promise in the finished project and hoped it might sell 250,000 copies, a significant success for a raw outfit that resisted the slickness of MTV-ready fare. But audiences seemed to crave precisely this less polished, more urgent sound. Sales took off, first in the Pacific Northwest and then in other markets. Three months after launch, Nevermind dislodged Michael Jackson from the top spot on the Billboard chart. The album eventually sold 30 million copies worldwide, and for many listeners would stand out as the defining music of the era. Pearl Jam’s Ten, released almost at the same moment, found a receptive audience in the aftermath of Nirvana’s crossover success and would sell 10 million albums. Once again, a red-hot movement had risen up outside the major urban centers of the music industry, but even the accountants and lawyers, who increasingly called the shots from their LA and New York offices, could grasp the significance of those numbers.

MTV 想要融入这股新的时代精神，但你很难想象有哪位艺术家比涅槃乐队主唱科特·柯本更不符合该电视台的理念。早在 20 世纪 80 年代末，MTV 就已开始减少对音乐录影带的依赖，并试图打造一个更广泛的形象，成为青年文化中欢快而迷人的代言人。该电视台在佛罗里达州代托纳比奇的春假广播节目捕捉到了这种新精神，其代表是令人陶醉的音乐、比基尼、美女和无忧无虑的派对态度。没有什么比柯本和他的垃圾摇滚美学更背离这种精神了，我指的不仅仅是从阳光明媚的代托纳比奇到阴云密布的西雅图的横跨美国东西海岸的距离。柯本身体孱弱，患有临床抑郁症，并深受无法戒除的毒瘾的困扰。涅槃乐队的成功让他陷入了他并不喜欢的聚光灯下，并让他承受着不必要的压力，不得不重新定位自己，成为流行文化的领袖和一代人的公众代言人。科本绝对不是那种喜欢春假音乐的人，即使他能为MTV和流行文化爱好者贡献的技能——最重要的是，他作为音乐人的创造力和作为表演者的强大气场——也与他如今被要求的形象格格不入。垃圾摇滚的审美是黑暗而尖锐的，尖刻而内向的。它的歌曲探讨了强奸、堕胎、暴力、不正常的家庭，以及外人，甚至是忠实粉丝的不理解，而随着垃圾摇滚成为主流，忠实粉丝越来越被视为一种负担。

MTV wanted to play a part in this new zeitgeist, but you could hardly imagine an artist less suited to the network’s ethos than Nirvana’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain. In the late 1980s, MTV was already reducing its dependency on music videos and trying to forge a broader identity as the upbeat and glamorous voice of youth culture. The network’s Spring Break broadcasts from Daytona Beach, Florida, captured the new spirit, represented by a heady mix of music, bikinis, beautiful people, and a carefree party-time attitude. Nothing could be further from this ethos than Cobain and his grunge aesthetic, and I am not just referring to the coast-to-coast distance from sunny Daytona Beach to overcast Seattle. Cobain was physically frail, clinically depressed, and plagued by addictions he couldn’t overcome. Nirvana’s success thrust him into a limelight he did not enjoy and put him under unwanted pressure to redefine himself as a pop culture leader and a public voice for a generation. Cobain definitely wasn’t a Spring Break kind of guy, and even the skills he could contribute to MTV and the pop culture vultures—above all, his creativity as a musician and powerful presence as a performer—were out of alignment with the persona now demanded of him. The grunge aesthetic was dark and edgy, sharp-tongued and inward-looking. Its songs dealt with rape, abortion, violence, dysfunctional families, and the incomprehension of outsiders, or even devoted fans, the latter increasingly seen as a burden as grunge went mainstream.

在一个更理性的世界里，垃圾摇滚本应是一个局外人的运动。科特·柯本（Kurt Cobain）完全有能力在独立音乐的叛逆边缘地带活动；他讽刺的态度和极度敏感使他成为嘲讽和批评主流音乐的完美陪衬，但却不是加入主流音乐的合适人选。MTV的老板们肯定也意识到了这一点，但他们吸取了摇滚牟取暴利的关键教训——即局外人和颠覆者定下了基调，并为总部的高管们买单。在之前的一篇报道中音乐创新的合法化和主流化过程耗时数十年，但在现代生活中，一切都发生得更快。如果风险足够高，为什么不把这个漫长的过程压缩到几个月内呢？垃圾摇滚可以提升该网络的街头信誉，因为它需要看起来不像一个利用青少年欲望牟利的利润驱动型公司。

In a more sensible world, grunge would have remained an outsider movement. Kurt Cobain was well equipped to operate in the renegade fringes of indie music; his sardonic attitudes and hypersensitivity made him a perfect foil to taunt and critique the mainstream, but a poor candidate to join it. The bosses at MTV must have realized this, too, but they had learned the key lesson of rock profiteering—namely, that outsiders and disruptors set the tone and pay the bills for the execs at the home office. In an earlier time, the process of legitimization and mainstreaming of musical innovations took decades, but everything was happening faster in modern life. If the stakes were high enough, why couldn’t that drawn-out process get compressed into just a few months? Grunge could enhance the network’s street cred at a time when it needed to look like something other than a profit-driven corporation cashing in on adolescent lust.

起初，MTV 谨慎地播放涅槃乐队的“Smells Like Teen Spirit”视频，将其隔离在其另类摇滚节目《120 分钟》中。视频本身是在极低的预算下在一天内拍摄完成的，科本嘲笑第一个剪辑就像阿司匹林或 AT&T 的广告。即便如此，这首歌还是成为了 MTV 热门歌曲日益花哨格式的有力解毒剂，高管和歌迷都将涅槃乐队视为炙手可热的新潮流引领者。但科本公司拒绝同化。当涅槃乐队被邀请参加 MTV 音乐录影带大奖时，科本告诉惊恐的网络代表，乐队将演唱歌曲“Rape Me”而不是其举世闻名的热门歌曲。科本最终妥协并同意用不那么刺耳的“Lithium”代替，但作为一个恶作剧，在播出过程中播放了“Rape Me”的开头，然后才切换到商定的曲目。该网络最终放松了对涅槃乐队的限制，甚至《强奸我》也在 1993 年该网络的新年前夜特别节目中获得了一席之地。但垃圾摇滚世界观和流行文化商业指令之间固有的紧张关系永远无法得到充分解决。

At first MTV played Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video with caution, quarantining it on its alternative rock show 120 Minutes. The video itself had been shot in a single day on a shoestring budget, and Cobain derided the first cut as akin to a commercial for aspirin or AT&T. Even so, the song stood out as a potent antidote to the increasing slickness of format-driven MTV hits, and both the execs and fans embraced Nirvana as the hot new trendsetter. But Cobain & Company resisted assimilation. When Nirvana was invited to perform on the MTV Video Music Awards, Cobain told horrified network representatives that the band would play the song “Rape Me” instead of its world-famous hit. Cobain eventually compromised and agreed to substitute the less prickly “Lithium,” but as a prank played the opening of “Rape Me” during the broadcast before shifting to the agreed-upon number. The network eventually loosened its restrictions on Nirvana, and even “Rape Me” got its moment on the network’s New Year’s Eve special in 1993. But the inherent tensions between the grunge worldview and the commercial dictates of pop culture would never be adequately resolved.

事情总得有个交代，而这个交代的正是科特·柯本。随着乐队人气飙升，他的私生活也随之失控。1994年3月3日，他在罗马因服药过量险些丧命——当时他很可能是自杀未遂。两周后，西雅图警方接到科本妻子考特妮·洛芙的报警电话，称这位摇滚巨星把自己锁在房间里，手里拿着一把.38口径左轮手枪，威胁要自杀。警察赶到后，科本否认了这一说法，并交出了枪。但他的问题却从此愈演愈烈。月底，科本住进了一家戒毒中心。洛杉矶国际机场附近，但首先购买了一把20口径的猎枪和弹药。康复训练只持续了两天，科本就跳过栅栏逃跑了。

Something had to give here, and what gave was Kurt Cobain. As the band’s popularity escalated, his private life spiraled out of control. On March 3, 1994, he almost died from an overdose in Rome—in what might have been a suicide attempt. Two weeks later, Seattle police responded to a call from Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, who reported that the rock star had locked himself in a room with a .38-caliber revolver and was threatening to kill himself. When the officers arrived, Cobain denied the claim and surrendered his gun to them. But his problems only escalated from there. At the end of the month, Cobain checked into a rehab center near the Los Angeles International Airport, but first purchased a 20-gauge shotgun and ammunition. Rehab lasted only two days before Cobain jumped a fence and escaped.

4月8日，科特·柯本（Kurt Cobain）的遗体在西雅图的家中被发现，旁边还有一张遗书。官方认定的死因是头部自伤枪伤。遗书内容杂乱无章，与其说是解释，不如说是哀悼。事后，关于这位垃圾摇滚乐坛第一位也是最后一位巨星为何自杀，人们提出了许多理论。柯本与毒瘾和抑郁症的斗争或许提供了足够的理由，但遗书本身却详细阐述了他作为音乐人的使命。“我已经太多年没有感受到聆听和创作音乐，以及阅读和写作的那种兴奋了，”柯本写道。“我对这些事情感到无比愧疚。” ¹

On April 8, Kurt Cobain’s body was found at his home in Seattle, with a suicide note nearby. The official cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The note itself was rambling, less an explanation than a lament, and in the aftermath many theories were offered about why grunge’s first and last superstar had taken his own life. Cobain’s battles with addiction and depression may have provided sufficient reasons, but the note itself dwelled at length on his vocation as a musician. “I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now,” Cobain wrote. “I feel guilty beyond words about these things.”¹

正如十五年前朋克和席德·维瑟斯的去世一样，垃圾摇滚也经历了这场灾难，但只是勉强维持。它们各自在流行文化前沿的辉煌时刻已成过去，而它们暴力的结局也引发了人们的合理质疑：这些极具颠覆性的音乐运动能否快速进入主流文化。几乎在一夜之间，音乐界的高管们将朋克和垃圾摇滚中根深蒂固的对抗和敌意重新包装成大众市场的商业产品，这让断层线达到了临界点。这些紧张关系并不总是会导致像超级巨星自杀这样显而易见的结果，在早期的案例中——巴迪·博尔登与爵士乐、罗伯特·约翰逊与布鲁斯、查理·帕克与比波普，以及后来的图帕克·夏库尔与臭名昭著的BIG乐队与嘻哈——官方记录中都会出现不同的死因。然而，任何对音乐创新的源头和历程进行客观评估，都不得不认真审视音乐文化中诸多决定性转变中似乎蕴含的破坏和暴力的潜在性。我们或许应该得出一个显而易见的结论——在一个更倾向于将歌曲视为逃避现实的娱乐的时代，这个结论显而易见，但通常却被遗忘——那就是音乐是一种令人敬畏的破坏和动荡的力量，它与暴乱或游击战的相似之处比我们通常认为的要多。选择承认。人员伤亡和附带损害是不可避免的，尤其是当巨额资金和企业命运也岌岌可危时。

As with punk and the death of Sid Vicious fifteen years earlier, grunge survived this loss, but just barely. Their respective moments at the forefront of pop culture had passed, and their violent ends raised legitimate questions about whether fiercely subversive musical movements could ride a fast track into the cultural mainstream. Fault lines reached a breaking point when, almost overnight, music-industry executives repackaged the deep-seated antagonisms and hostilities brewing in punk and grunge as mass-market commercial products. These tensions don’t always result in something as visible as a superstar’s suicide, and in the earlier cases—with Buddy Bolden and jazz, Robert Johnson and blues, and Charlie Parker and bebop, or later, with Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. and hip-hop—different causes of death show up on the official documents. But no impartial assessment of the sources and courses of musical innovation can avoid taking a long hard look at the potential for destruction and violence that seems embedded in so many decisive shifts in musical culture. We should perhaps reach for the obvious conclusion—obvious, yet typically forgotten, in an age that prefers to view songs as escapist entertainment—that music is an awe-inspiring force of disruption and upheaval, with more similarities to a riot or guerrilla warfare than we usually choose to acknowledge. Casualties and collateral damage are inevitable, especially when vast sums of money and corporate destinies are also at stake.

在后科本时代，摇滚乐依然是一门大生意，但却难以兑现其作为永久革命音乐的承诺。我仍然记得第一次听到一个电台致力于怀旧经典摇滚乐形式的震惊——这似乎是对整个摇滚乐愿景的背叛。你不如开一家供应陈旧、不新鲜食物的餐馆，而不是开设一个以老摇滚为主题的电台。但早在 1983 年，你就能预见摇滚乐的未来是一场复古运动，当时凭借电影《保送入学》而声名鹊起的汤姆·克鲁斯穿着内衣跳舞，对口型唱着“老式摇滚乐”。在 20 世纪 80 年代末和 90 年代，摇滚乐队就像股票一样涨跌——可能是休伊·路易斯与新闻合唱团 (Huey Lewis and the News) 短暂流行，然后是 Hootie and the Blowfish，或者是其他一些昙花一现的势头强劲的乐队。但很少有艺术家拥有如此持久的影响力。最优秀的乐队往往会抵制商业预期，或许他们明智地从以往商业利益与摇滚叛乱之间的“合作关系”破裂的后果中吸取了教训。例如，Radiohead 的影响力就因其对艺术摇滚概念的拥抱和愿意在方向上做出意想不到的转变而得到提升——有时甚至歌迷也会抱怨乐队故意把歌曲弄得很难听。爱尔兰乐队 U2 故意放弃了打造其轰动一时、在 20 个国家/地区登顶排行榜的热门歌曲《约书亚树》的模式，以更黑暗的音色和更内省的情绪进入 90 年代——这导致一些人讽刺这些忘恩负义的乐队成员似乎一心想砍倒约书亚树。现在，要想在摇滚乐中保留任何有意义的东西，就必须与所有不断推动墨守成规和谨慎打造品牌的累积力量作斗争。在这样的环境下，摇滚乐队能够改变你的生活，更不用说改变社会方向的想法，如今已难以被接受。摇滚乐正成为众多争夺忠诚度的风格之一，随着核心听众年龄的增长，它激发革命性变革的潜力也随之减弱。社会运动也随之衰落。摇滚乐既然已经是现状，又如何能打破现状呢？

In the post-Cobain world, rock remained a big business, but struggled to live up to its promise as the music of permanent revolution. I still recall my shock when I first heard a radio station devoted to a nostalgia-driven classic rock format—this seemed like a betrayal of the whole rock vision. You might as well open a restaurant that served old, stale food as launch a radio station built around old rock. But you could already see the future of rock as a retro movement back in 1983, when Tom Cruise, rising to stardom in the film Risky Business, danced in his underwear while lip-syncing the words to “Old Time Rock and Roll.” In the late 1980s and the 1990s, rock bands rose and fell like stocks—it might be Huey Lewis and the News for a spell, then Hootie and the Blowfish, or some other short-lived momentum play. But few artists possessed much staying power. The best bands tended to resist commercial expectations, perhaps wisely learning lessons from the fallout of previous ‘partnerships’ between business interests and rock rebellion. Radiohead’s influence, for example, was enhanced by its embrace of art-rock concepts and its willingness to take unexpected shifts in direction—sometimes even fans complained that the band was making its songs intentionally difficult. The Irish group U2 deliberately turned away from the formula that produced its stratospheric hit The Joshua Tree, which topped the charts in twenty countries, and entered the 1990s with a darker sonic palette and more introspective moods—leading some to quip that these ungrateful bandmates seemed intent on chopping down the Joshua Tree. To hold onto anything meaningful in rock now required a battle against all the accumulated forces that pushed incessantly for sticking-to-the-formula and cautious brand building. In this environment, the notion that a rock band could change your life, let alone the direction of society, now struggled to pass the sniff test. Rock was becoming one style among many in the battle for genre loyalty, and as its core audience aged, its potential for stirring up revolutionary social movements waned in proportion. How could rock disrupt the status quo when it was the status quo?

但音乐产业仍然需要颠覆性的局外人——他们始终是其命脉——而如今，他们已在别处找到了他们。说唱歌手和嘻哈生活方式提供了一种新的颠覆性力量，一种永恒反叛的另类音乐。同样，全球娱乐公司对这种音乐的培育几乎功不可没，它自发崛起，会计师和律师对此毫不在意。令人匪夷所思的是，即使在20世纪末，当资金雄厚的音乐产业愿意向未经证实的乐队投入数百万美元时，真正的创新仍在主流唱片公司不知情的情况下发生。事实上，我们几千年来所见的所有颠覆性音乐的要素，随着嘻哈音乐的兴起而再次重现。局外人再次成为创新的源泉。最后的将是第一，第一的将是最后的。为了找到这些变革的催化剂，我们需要把注意力转向世界上最具影响力的大都市纽约市，但不是它的精英和富裕的艺术组织，而是它最贫困的街区。

But the music industry still needed disruptive outsiders—they are always its lifeblood—and by now had found them elsewhere. Rappers and the hip-hop lifestyle provided a new subversion, an alternative music of permanent rebellion. Here again, the global entertainment corporations deserve very little credit for nurturing this music, which rose up on its own without the accountants and lawyers paying any notice. It’s extraordinary to consider that even in the late twentieth century, when a cash-rich music business willingly threw millions of dollars at unproven bands, the real innovations were taking place without the major labels knowing about them. Indeed, all the ingredients of subversive music we have seen over a period of thousands of years were repeated again with the rise of hip-hop. The outsider again emerged as the source of innovation. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. And to find these catalysts for change, we need to turn our attention to the most influential metropolis in the world, New York City, but not to its elites and rich arts organizations, rather to its most impoverished neighborhoods.

全球最大唱片公司的高管们在距离嘻哈音乐诞生地不到十英里的地方工作，但他们仿佛生活在另一个星球上。你怎么从RCA大楼去南布朗克斯？答案是：你走不到。“南布朗克斯是一座墓地——一座死亡之城，”在说唱音乐从该社区兴起前不久，当地一家诊所的负责人向《纽约时报》宣称。20% 的家庭没有自来水，一半的家庭有时没有暖气。那里的预期寿命比巴拿马还低。婴儿死亡率是全国其他地区的两倍。大约 60 万个制造业工作岗位从该社区消失，青年失业率高达 40%。人均收入仅为 2,430 美元，不到全国平均水平的一半。银行不愿在这里放贷，企业经常倒闭或离开去其他地方寻找更好的发展机会。唯一繁荣的组织是帮派，据估计，一百个不同的帮派，总成员超过一万名年轻人，瓜分了布朗克斯区的控制权。警察的主要职责就是视而不见。这种文化催生了嘻哈音乐^。2

The executives at the largest record labels in the world worked less than ten miles from the birthplace of hip-hop, but they might as well have been living on a different planet. How do you get from the RCA Building to South Bronx? The answer: You don’t. “The South Bronx is a necropolis—a city of death,” declared the head of a local health clinic to the New York Times shortly before rap emerged from the neighborhood. Twenty percent of the homes lacked running water, and half sometimes went without heat. Life expectancy was lower there than in Panama. Infant mortality was twice the rate of the rest of the country. Some 600,000 manufacturing jobs had disappeared from the neighborhood, and youth unemployment was a staggering 40 percent. Per capita income was just $2,430, less than half the national average. Banks wouldn’t lend money here, and businesses often shut down or left for better prospects elsewhere. The only thriving organizations were gangs, and by some estimates, a hundred different ones, boasting aggregate membership of more than 10,000 young people, carved up control of the Bronx. The main responsibility of police was to look the other way. This was the culture that created hip-hop.²

当时“非洲未来主义”（Afrofuturism）这个词还不存在，但嘻哈音乐的起源预示着它对前瞻性科技的颂扬，并将其作为黑人文化的表达工具。别被贫困社区所迷惑：几乎在每个关键时刻，这种音乐类型的根源都在重新利用旧科技，并发明新技术。那些用说唱和录音处理为嘻哈音乐奠定基础的DJ们，其实是贫民窟里的技术达人，他们的演出设备看起来就像一个来自更时髦的另类世界——美国宇航局（NASA）的改装任务控制中心。酷DJ赫克（Kool DJ Herc），牙买加裔美国人克莱夫·坎贝尔（Clive Campbell）的艺名——这个音乐类型的表演者通常会采用新的身份，听起来不像名字，更像是超级英雄的另一个自我——不仅因为他的说唱而广受赞誉，还因为他那震耳欲聋的巨大扬声器，其音量之大，远超所有竞争对手。 Grandmaster Flash（本名 Joseph Sadler，出生于巴巴多斯）开发或推广了一系列声音处理技术，其中许多技术预示了后世数字录音棚软件的模拟工具时代。他通过在两台唱机上来回播放唱片，延长歌曲的某些部分，保持强劲的器乐间奏而不丢失节奏，这预示了下一代鼓循环的出现。最初发明的不起眼的鼓机，是电风琴演奏者在家中或俗气的休闲演出中使用的一种噱头，在那个时代仍被大多数职业乐队所鄙视，但 Grandmaster Flash 和其他一些人将其改造成灵活的节拍器，强化了律动，并补充了唱机发出的声音。甚至在商业数字工具和采样文化使其合法化之前，一种“剪切粘贴”的思维模式就占据了主导地位。就像早期的布鲁斯歌手那样，他们肆无忌惮地借用自己听到的内容，并自由改编，仿佛版权法对他们毫不适用。说唱的先驱们也根据当时的流行目的，随意混搭。如今，唱片不仅仅是播放，它们还会被刮擦，在唱片上来回移动唱针，制造出各种打击乐效果，或者用作为主唱DJ的即兴说唱伴奏。本质上，唱机本身就变成了一件乐器，媒介再次成为信息。

The term Afrofuturism didn’t exist back then, but the origins of hip-hop anticipate its celebration of forward-looking technology as an expressive tool for black culture. Don’t be fooled by the impoverished neighborhoods: at almost every juncture the roots of this genre repurposed old technologies and invented new ones. The DJs whose raps and manipulation of recordings laid the foundation for hip-hop were ghetto techno mavens, and their setup at gigs looked like a tricked-out Mission Control from a hipper alternative-world NASA. Kool DJ Herc, the moniker for Jamaican American Clive Campbell—the idiom’s performers typically adopted new identities that sounded less like names and more like superhero alter egos—gained acclaim not just for his raps but also for humongous speakers that out-blasted all rivals. Grandmaster Flash (born in Barbados as Joseph Sadler) developed or popularized a host of sound manipulation techniques, many of them anticipating with analog tools the digital studio software of a later age. Spinning records back and forth on two turntables, he could extend portions of a song, keeping a propulsive instrumental break going without losing the beat, a prefiguring of the drum loops of the next generation. The humble drum machine, originally invented as a gimmick for electric organ players to use at home or on the cheesiest lounge gigs, was still despised during this era by most professional bands, but Grandmaster Flash and others repurposed it into a flexible beat box that intensified the groove and supplemented the sounds coming from the turntables. A kind of cut-and-paste mentality predominated, even before commercial digital tools and sampling culture legitimized it. Much like the early blues singers, who brazenly borrowed what they heard and adapted it freely as if copyright laws didn’t apply to them, the pioneers of rap mixed and matched whatever served the purposes of the moment. Records now weren’t just played, they were also scratched, moving the needle back and forth across a record to create a range of percussive effects, or used as backing for the spontaneous rap of the presiding DJ. In essence, the turntable was transformed into a musical instrument in its own right, the medium again becoming the message.

一开始，没人把这叫做说唱或嘻哈，对很多听众来说，这仍然只是舞曲。但歌词赋予了这种新语言比DJ们进军社区时所动用的各种大规模打击乐器更强劲的感染力。说唱的起源有很多种——可以追溯到20世纪70年代深情的DJ在电台热门歌曲前奏中充满节奏感的吟唱，也可以追溯到劳动号子的吟唱副歌；可以追溯到吉尔伯特和沙利文的轻快歌曲，也可以追溯到吉尔·斯科特-赫伦的爵士诗歌；甚至可以追溯到更早的非洲格里奥和格里高利圣咏。通过半音乐性的吟唱来强化意义，这种做法和人类社会一样古老。但当第一批说唱歌手出现时，音乐界大多已经忘记了单音吟唱的力量。这些南布朗克斯的新兴音乐人仿佛绕过了千百年来的复调音乐的修修补补，回归了强大的原始原则。然而，那些将节奏吟唱与宗教信仰联系起来的人——此前，这种音乐在西方世界的主要用途——却大吃一惊。新的说唱强调了这种音乐的局外人地位，取而代之的是劝诫、吹嘘、嘲讽、谴责、各种情色浪漫的姿态、自传式的评论、尖锐的社会政治批判、各种行动号召，以及英语中最广泛的脏话。

No one called this rap or hip-hop at the start, and for many listeners this was still just dance music. But the lyrics would give this new idiom even more bite than the accumulated weapons of mass percussion mobilized by DJs on their incursions into the neighborhoods. You can trace the lineage of rap in many ways—back to soulful 1970s disk jockeys speaking rhythmically over intros to radio hits, or to the chanted refrains of work songs; to the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan, or the jazz poetry of Gil Scott-Heron; or further back to African griots and Gregorian chant. The intensification of signification via semi-musical chanting is as old as human society itself. But by the time the first rappers came onto the scene, the music world had mostly forgotten the power of monophonic chant. It was as if these South Bronx upstarts were bypassing a thousand years of polyphonic tinkering and returning to powerful first principles. But those who associated rhythmic chanting with religious devotion, hitherto its primary use in the Western world, were in for a shock. The new rapping emphasized the music’s outsider status, opting instead for exhortation, boasting, taunting, denunciation, erotic and romantic posturing of all stripes, autobiographical commentary, harsh sociopolitical critiques, various calls to action, and the widest range of swear words accessible in the English language.

对许多听众来说，Sugarhill Gang 1979 年的热门单曲《Rapper's Delight》引领了这种打破传统的新音乐风格。但即使在商业音乐界注意到之后，业内许多人无疑仍将说唱视为昙花一现的潮流，就像 20 世纪 50 年代的星探们看待第一批摇滚热门歌曲一样。主流唱片公司的不理解为说唱企业家填补了这一空白提供了机会。《Rapper's Delight》背后的厂牌 Sugar Hill 于 1986 年宣布破产，而嘻哈音乐的另一个早期进入者 Enjoy Records 于 1987 年倒闭；但这些先驱为商业说唱奠定了基调，并为后来的“黄金时代”创业公司奠定了模式，例如 Profile（1980 年）、Jive（1981 年）、Def Jam（1984 年）、Cold Chillin'（1986 年）。Ruthless（1986年）、Delicious Vinyl（1987年）和Death Row（1991年）。这些歌手的职业生涯辉煌，几乎没有任何传统的营销手段，也鲜少有业内巨头的参与。他们袖手旁观，眼睁睁地看着Run-DMC、Public Enemy、Beastie Boys、LL Cool J等乐队将他们旗下更传统的灵魂乐和R&B明星推上排行榜。纳尔逊·乔治回忆起在说唱音乐崛起初期，他担任《公告牌》黑人音乐编辑时，各大唱片公司对他的不理解。当时普遍的态度是“‘这能持续多久？’他们认为说唱唱片充其量只是一时的热潮，最坏的情况则是，它只是美国黑人的一个污点。” ³

For many listeners, the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit single “Rapper’s Delight” served as introduction to this iconoclastic new sound. But even after the commercial music world took notice, many in the industry no doubt viewed rap as a short-term fad, much as 1950s talent scouts had looked upon the first rock ’n’ roll hits. The incomprehension of the major labels provided opportunities for rap entrepreneurs to fill the void. Sugar Hill, the label behind “Rapper’s Delight,” would declare bankruptcy in 1986, and Enjoy Records, another early entrant in hip-hop, shut down in 1987; but these pioneers set the tone for commercial rap and laid the pattern for later ‘golden age’ entrepreneurial businesses such as Profile (1980), Jive (1981), Def Jam (1984), Cold Chillin’ (1986), Ruthless (1986), Delicious Vinyl (1987), and Death Row (1991). Huge careers were launched, with almost no traditional marketing and little involvement from the big players in the industry, who sat by and watched Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and others push their more conventional soul and R&B stars off the charts. Nelson George recalls the incomprehension of the major labels during his tenure as black music editor at Billboard in the early days of rap’s ascendancy. The general attitude was “‘How long will this last?’ They saw rap records, at best, as a fad and, at worst, a blotch on African America.”³

但说唱音乐非但没有消退，反而很快进入了主流。1986 年，Aerosmith 与 Run-DMC 合作发行了热门专辑《Raising Hell》，销量达 300 万张，其中单曲“Walk This Way”进入公告牌排行榜前五名，这是当时嘻哈歌曲的最高排名。大约在这个时候，野兽男孩开始出现在 MTV 上，他们演唱了一首兄弟会风格的歌曲《Fight for Your Right to Party》，与该电视台以娱乐为导向的青年文化精神完美契合。乐队的专辑《Licensed to Ill》销量达 400 万张，创下了说唱音乐的另一个新纪录。几个月后，LL Cool J 的专辑《 Bigger and Deffer》大获成功，热门单曲“I Need Love”证明说唱也可以成为浪漫情歌的载体。

But instead of retreating, rap was soon crossing over into the mainstream. Aerosmith collaborated with Run-D.M.C. on the 1986 hit album Raising Hell, which sold three million copies and placed the single “Walk This Way” in the top five of the Billboard chart—the highest ranking of a hip-hop song to date. Around this time, the Beastie Boys started showing up on MTV, with a frat-friendly anthem, “Fight for Your Right to Party,” that fit perfectly with the network’s fun-oriented youth culture ethos. The band’s album Licensed to Ill sold four million copies, setting another new record for rap. A few months later, LL Cool J enjoyed a mega-hit with his Bigger and Deffer album, and proved, with the hit single “I Need Love,” that rap could also serve as a vehicle for romantic ballads.

我们已经在朋克摇滚和垃圾摇滚中见证了市场力量如何试图压缩所有非主流音乐流派（如果它们存在足够长的时间）最终都会经历的合法化过程。在过去的时代，这种主流化可能需要整整一代人甚至更长时间才能实现，但那些唯利是图的公司真的会袖手旁观，任由其他对脏话和尖锐歌词不那么敏感的音乐人利用嘻哈音乐赚钱吗？回想起来，嘻哈音乐提供了一个引人入胜、有时甚至荒谬的案例研究，突显了当一个新兴运动仍然以其叛逆的非主流身份为荣，却面对着执意将其商业化的强大利益集团时，由此产生的所有紧张和不协调。这种不协调的最初迹象之一，就是许多由耳熟能详的明星演唱的新奇说唱歌曲，其中许多人都缺乏街头信誉。罗德尼·丹杰菲尔德发行了他的专辑《Rappin' Rodney》。1983年，他们招募了与库尔蒂斯·布洛合作创作《The Breaks》的同一批词曲作者，并在当时真正的说唱歌手被排除在MTV之外的时代，获得了巨大的成功。“黄金时代”的其他明星说唱歌手包括大卫·哈塞尔霍夫、乔·皮斯科波、切维·蔡斯、卢·里德、汤姆·汉克斯、丹·艾克罗伊德以及1985年洛杉矶公羊队全体成员。说唱当时是一个时尚的文化基因，每个人都想从中分一杯羹。

We have already seen with punk rock and grunge how market forces attempted to compress the process of legitimization that all outsider music genres eventually experience if they last long enough. In previous eras, this mainstreaming might require an entire generation or longer, but could profit-hungry corporations really stand by and wait, letting others—less squeamish about swear words and edgy lyrics—make money off hip-hop? In retrospect, hip-hop presents a fascinating, and sometimes ludicrous, case study that highlights all the tensions and incongruities resulting when a new movement, still proud of its rebellious outsider status, faces powerful interests determined to monetize it. One of the first signs of this incongruity came via the many novelty rap songs performed by familiar celebrities, many of them woefully lacking in street cred. Rodney Dangerfield released his Rappin’ Rodney record in 1983—enlisting the same songwriters who worked with Kurtis Blow on “The Breaks”—and earned heavy rotation on MTV at a time when genuine rap artists were kept off the network. Other celebrity rappers of the ‘golden age’ included David Hasselhoff, Joe Piscopo, Chevy Chase, Lou Reed, Tom Hanks, Dan Aykroyd, and the entire 1985 Los Angeles Rams. Rap was a fashionable meme, and everyone wanted a piece of it.

但赚钱并不一定要出唱片。各式消费品公司纷纷加入这股潮流。1986 年，阿迪达斯与 Run-DMC 达成鞋类协议，奖励该乐队录制一首赞美其德国鞋类的歌曲。每个主要的汽水品牌最终都会寻找嘻哈音乐的拥护者：Kurtis Blow 为雪碧演唱说唱；Run-DMC 在平面和电视广告中挥舞可口可乐罐子；MC Hammer 觉得自己也应该拒绝百事可乐的合约。嘻哈音乐崇尚品牌友好型精神，即使没有签订代言协议，其拥护者也会赞扬高地位的产品，这使得这种音乐类型成为企业向年轻人群营销的完美载体。说唱音乐似乎是理想品牌和提升地位的生活方式产品的现成平台。

But you didn’t need to make a record to make a buck. A wide range of consumer product companies were jumping on the bandwagon. In 1986, Adidas cut a shoe deal with Run-D.M.C., rewarding the band for a song it had recorded in praise of its German footwear. Every major soda brand would eventually seek out a hip-hop advocate: Kurtis Blow rapped for Sprite; Run-D.M.C. brandished Coca Cola cans in a print and TV campaign; MC Hammer didn’t feel he was too legit to turn down a Pepsi deal. The brand-friendly ethos of hip-hop, whose exponents praise high-status products even when no endorsement deal has been cut, made this genre a perfect vehicle for corporate marketing to the youth demographic. Rap seemed like a ready-made platform for aspirational brands and status-enhancing lifestyle products.

真的会这么容易吗？嘻哈音乐能成为主流而不遭到抵制吗？在 20 世纪 80 年代末和 90 年代初，很多人肯定都这么认为。就连华特迪士尼公司的唱片业务（最初是为了推广“戴维克罗克特的歌谣”和针对年轻人的道德励志歌曲而成立的）也大举进军说唱音乐——其早期作品包括 Lifers Group 的一张专辑，收录了在新泽西服刑的男子的表演，以及伊斯兰民族倡导者 Prince Akeem 的嘻哈专辑Coming Down Like Babylon。再见米老鼠；你好路易斯法拉坎。但公司高管显然低估了嘻哈社区内部的阻力，该社区非常重视真实性问题。

Was it really going to be this easy? Could hip-hop go mainstream without a backlash or boycotts? Many must have believed just that in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even Walt Disney Corporation’s record business, originally launched to promote the “Ballad of Davy Crockett” and virtue-inspiring songs for youngsters, was moving aggressively into rap—its early offerings included an album by Lifers Group, consisting of performances by men serving life prison sentences in New Jersey, and Coming Down Like Babylon, a hip-hop album by Nation of Islam exponent Prince Akeem. Goodbye Mickey Mouse; hello Louis Farrakhan. But the execs in the corporate suites clearly underestimated the resistance within the hip-hop community itself, which took questions of authenticity very seriously.

就在美国企业开始接受嘻哈音乐的时候，新一代更坚强、更坚韧的表演者正在崛起，成为嘻哈音乐的先锋。几乎就在迪士尼随着说唱的出现，“黑帮”一词进入了人们的词汇——这个标签涵盖了黑人社区多年来酝酿的生活方式和态度，如今即将登上报纸头条。如果以表情包和提及次数来衡量，球鞋的关联很快就会被帮派的关联所取代。嘻哈音乐或许还能卖出商品，但它真正的命运是成为内城区愤怒和抗议的焦点——它所展现出的活力和即时性是任何政治说辞或政党纲领都无法比拟的。

Even as corporate America began to embrace the genre, a new generation of tougher, grittier performers was rising to the forefront of hip-hop. Almost at the same moment that Disney discovered rap, the term gangsta entered the lexicon—a label that encompassed lifestyles and attitudes that had been brewing in the black community for years and was now about to make the front pages of newspapers. When measured by memes and mentions, sneaker affiliations would soon get eclipsed by gang affiliations. Hip-hop might still sell merchandise, but its true destiny was to serve as the focal point for outrage and protest in the inner city—something it did with a vitality and immediacy no political spiel or party platform could match.

NWA乐队的专辑《冲出康普顿》（Straight Outta Compton）几乎没有任何广播和全国巡演，却成功达到白金销量。然而，媒体的报道铺天盖地，大多是危言耸听。歌曲中充斥着街头帮派、警察暴力、种族歧视以及洛杉矶中南部的生活，将抗议与对暴力的美化交织在一起。一些人认为这是音乐现实主义的新境界；另一些人则谴责这是欺诈性的扭曲，是对黑人文化古老刻板印象的误导性宣传，美化了杀人者而不是受害者。在某些情况下，警察拒绝在NWA乐队演出时提供安保。在底特律，警察冲上舞台，与雇佣的保安发生冲突；随后，他们在乐队入住的酒店将其拘留。教会团体也参与其中，在其支持者中动员抗议，就像他们之前对猫王和其他音乐明星所做的那样。更糟糕的是，联邦调查局的一名助理局长向NWA的唱片公司发出了一封谴责信——这一举动很快登上了《村声》杂志的封面，用大写字母和红色字体写道：“FBI讨厌这支乐队”。这种宣传是买不到的，所有这些努力只是提升了NWA的销量和名气。

N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton album managed to reach platinum status with virtually no airplay and without a national tour. But media coverage was intense, most of it alarmist. Songs about street gangs, police brutality, racial profiling, and life in South Central Los Angeles mixed protest with a glamorization of violence. Some saw this as a new level of realism in music; others denounced it as a fraudulent distortion, a misguided promotion of age-old stereotypes of black culture that glorified those doing the killing rather than their victims. In some instances, police officers refused to provide security at the N.W.A.’s appearances. In Detroit, cops actually rushed the stage and ended up in a scuffle with hired security; later they detained the band at their hotel. Church groups got into the act, mobilizing protests among their constituencies, much as they had previously with Elvis and other music stars. As the coup de grace, an assistant director at the FBI sent a denunciatory letter to the group’s record label—a move soon announced on the cover of The Village Voice, which proclaimed, in block capitals and large red type: THE FBI HATES THIS BAND. You can’t buy that kind of publicity, and all these efforts merely boosted N.W.A.’s sales and fame.

时代变了。就在几年前，家长音乐资源中心公布了“肮脏的十五首”——一份1985年最令人反感的歌曲榜单。其中没有一首说唱歌曲上榜。但在20世纪80年代末90年代初，说唱音乐取代了所有其他形式的颠覆性音乐。登上头条的不仅仅是黑帮生活方式，或是那些淫秽的言辞和绰号，还有日益明显的性取向，常常带有厌女的语气。几周后随着《冲出康普顿》（Straight Outta Compton）的发行，以粗俗说唱闻名的迈阿密乐队2 Live Crew推出了《As Nasty As They Wanna Be》。这张专辑一度成为头条新闻，但最终被联邦法官判定为淫秽。乐队在随后的审判中被判无罪，但其宣传再次帮助专辑获得白金销量——这是南方第一张获得这一殊荣的说唱专辑。

How times had changed. Just a few years earlier, the Parents Music Resource Center had publicized the “Filthy Fifteen”—a 1985 list of the most objectionable songs of the day. Not a single rap song made that list. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, rap displaced all other forms of subversive music. It wasn’t just the gangsta lifestyle that got headlines, or the obscenities and epithets, but increasingly, a frank sexuality, often misogynistic in tone. A few weeks after the release of Straight Outta Compton, the Miami group 2 Live Crew, known for its raunchy raps, launched As Nasty As They Wanna Be, a headline-grabbing album eventually branded as obscene by a federal judge. The group was acquitted at a subsequent trial, but here again the publicity helped the album go platinum—the first rap album from the South to earn that distinction.

这一切在当时看来既令人震惊又新鲜，但对黑帮生活方式和性爱的颂扬却与民谣音乐的悠久传统出奇地契合。正如我们所见，三分之二备受推崇的童谣歌曲都涉及性或暴力，有些歌曲甚至触及了即使是最叛逆的说唱歌手也难以接受的话题（乱伦、酷刑的生动描写等等），至少在20世纪90年代中期恐怖核说唱兴起之前是如此，当时恋尸癖、食人癖和其他怪诞行为的禁忌被打破了。再回想一下，有多少童谣歌曲颂扬了罗宾汉的英勇事迹——他出现在超过10%的童谣歌曲中——他是英国民间传说中最臭名昭著的黑帮，领导着一支保卫地盘的匪帮，疏远了与他同时代的FBI同僚。某种程度上，说唱歌手们自己也扮演着民间英雄的角色，尤其是在 20 世纪 90 年代的后黄金时代及之后。一种说唱神话正在兴起。图帕克·夏库尔 (Tupac Shakur) 的人生仿佛出自一首英式抒情歌曲，尽管根据时代和科技进行了修改。埃米纳姆甚至创造了一个舞台人物，Slim Shady——连名字听起来都像是出自一首传统抒情歌曲——他是暴力主角的典范。但最引人注目的是，在一个将真实性置于一切之上的音乐流派中，说唱歌手们在台上和台下都保持着相同的形象。当说唱歌手 50 Cent 转型拍电影《Get Rich or Die Tryin'》时，他扮演了一个以自己为原型的角色。这堪称理想。

All this seemed shocking and new at the time, but celebrations of the gangsta lifestyle and sexual exploits were surprisingly congruent with the age-old traditions of folk music. As we have seen, two-thirds of the cherished and ultra-respectable Child Ballads deal with sex or violence, and some address topics (incest, graphic descriptions of torture, etc.) that even the most rebellious rappers would hesitate to embrace, at least until the rise of horrorcore rap in the mid-1990s, when those last taboos of necrophilia, cannibalism, and other grotesqueries were crossed. Recall also how many Child Ballads celebrate the exploits of Robin Hood—he appears in more than 10 percent of those songs—who was the most notorious gangsta of British folklore, leader of a turf-defending posse that alienated the FBI-equivalents of his world. To some extent, the rappers themselves took on the role of folk heroes, increasingly so in the post-golden-age era of the 1990s and afterward. A kind of mythology of rap was now on the rise. The life of Tupac Shakur seems like something out of a British broadside ballad, albeit modified for modern times and technologies. Eminem went so far as to create an onstage persona, Slim Shady—even the name sounds like something out of a traditional ballad—who was an exemplar of the violent protagonist. But in the most striking cases, in a genre that valued authenticity above everything, the rappers maintained the same personas onstage and off. When rapper 50 Cent made the transition to film in Get Rich or Die Tryin’, he played a character based on himself. That was the ideal.

但更令人着迷的是，即使是那些看似完全抗拒主流化的说唱音乐，最终也获得了合法化。想想NWA的《冲出康普顿》（Straight Outta Compton）在25年里经历了什么？这张专辑激怒了所有人，从父母到……当时的联邦调查局 (FBI)。2015 年，好莱坞发行了获得奥斯卡提名的 NWA 传记片，也称为《冲出康普顿》。2016 年，《冲出康普顿》被评为第一张入选格莱美名人堂的嘻哈专辑；2017 年，《冲出康普顿》被美国国会图书馆选入国家录音登记处保存，这一殊荣仅限于具有文化、历史或艺术意义的作品。正如之前的许多案例一样，仅仅一代人就足以将最具颠覆性的音乐变成一座机构纪念碑。顺便说一句，联邦调查局发出的恐吓信现在在摇滚名人堂展出，这座纪念碑标志着当局试图控制歌曲演变的徒劳无功。

But still more fascinating is how even the parts of rap that seemed completely resistant to mainstreaming eventually got legitimized. Consider what a quarter century did for N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, the album that riled up everyone from parents to the FBI in its day. In 2015, Hollywood released its Oscar-nominated N.W.A. biopic, also called Straight Outta Compton. In 2016, Straight Outta Compton was honored as the first hip-hop album inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2017 was chosen by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry, a distinction limited to works of cultural, historical, or artistic significance. As in so many previous cases, a single generation sufficed to turn even the most subversive music into an institutional monument. By the way, the threatening letter sent by the FBI is now on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a monument to the futility of authorities’ attempts to control the evolution of song.

当然，到了此时，整个嘻哈音乐流派已经找到了许多通往主流的道路。有些是纯商业的——例如，嘻哈艺术家和流行歌手之间的许多合作，在新千年成为一种熟悉的模式。其他则是个人的，但具有高度的象征意义——例如，美国总统巴拉克·奥巴马开始推荐 Kanye West、Kendrick Lamar、Jay Z、Chance the Rapper 和 Drake 的歌曲列入他的椭圆形办公室批准的播放列表。其他则是机构性的，比如史密森尼学会 2017 年决定成立一个由 50 名学者和从业人员组成的委员会，编写官方的史密森尼嘻哈和说唱选集。而在一个里程碑时刻，Lamar 凭借他的专辑Damn获得了 2018 年普利策音乐奖——这一荣誉以前仅限于古典作曲家和偶尔的爵士乐艺术家，这是史无前例的。总体情况很清楚：嘻哈音乐走上了与之前每一次音乐丑闻相同的道路，并发现自己被宣布为受人尊敬。这就引出了一个显而易见的问题：音乐界是否存在着永久的革命？是否存在着某种足以颠覆主流的禁忌之声？或者，所有重要的音乐革命最终都会在博物馆和机构内找到出路？

Of course, by this time, the whole hip-hop genre had found many paths to the mainstream. Some were purely commercial—for example, the many collaborations between hip-hop artists and pop singers that emerged as a familiar formula in the new millennium. Others were personal but highly symbolic—as when President Barack Obama started recommending tracks by Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Jay Z, Chance the Rapper, and Drake on his Oval Office–approved playlists. Others were institutional, such as the Smithsonian’s 2017 decision to form a committee of fifty scholars and practitioners to create an official Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap. And in a landmark moment, Lamar took home the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2018 for his album Damn—unprecedented for an honor previously restricted to classical composers and the occasional jazz artist. The overarching picture is clear: hip-hop has followed the same path as every previous musical scandal, and found itself declared respectable. And this raises the obvious question: Is any permanent revolution in music possible? Is there any forbidden sound sufficiently subversive to resist mainstreaming? Or do all significant musical revolutions eventually find their way inside museums and institutions?

音乐界的权力掮客们很少会担心这些事情。即使一个音乐类型失去了优势，另一个类型也会崛起，有时甚至在最意想不到的地方，重新开启这个过程。如果他们等待的时间足够长，就会出现新的颠覆，新的革命——随之而来的是各种机会货币化和商业化。20世纪90年代，娱乐行业的巨头们只是在等待下一个外来者，等待变革的新力量。某种程度上，他们是正确的——一场革命即将到来。但这一次，这场革命并非来自音乐家；而是新一代的技术专家，他们对颠覆有着自己的理解。他们也有货币化和商业化的计划，坦率地说，他们不在乎音乐听起来像什么。他们想要颠覆的是整个行业，而不是歌曲本身。

The power brokers at the top of the music business rarely worry about such matters. Even if one genre loses its edge, another one rises up, sometimes in the most unexpected place, to start the process all over again. If they wait long enough, a new disruption will appear, a new revolution—with all its attendant opportunities to monetize and commercialize. In the 1990s, the masters of corporate entertainment were simply awaiting the next outsider, the new force of change. And, in a way, they were correct—there was a revolution on the way. But it wasn’t coming from musicians this time; rather, a new generation of technologists had their own notions about disruption. They also had plans to monetize and commercialize, and frankly, didn’t care what the music sounded like. They wanted to disrupt the industry, not the songs.

二十八

28

欢迎我们的新领主

Welcome Our New Overlords

20世纪80年代中期，我与硅谷一些最聪明的人共事，亲眼目睹他们酝酿出一个改变人们音乐消费方式的计划。这个团队的负责人曾是罗德学者，拥有哈佛大学的博士学位，他设想了一个高科技的数字传输系统，让乐迷可以创建自定义播放列表并下载歌曲供个人使用。当时我表达了我的怀疑，并非因为这个概念——它非常令人兴奋，而且比互联网时代之前的任何音乐零售平台都更以消费者为导向——而是因为我担心唱片公司会将这项新技术视为威胁而非机遇。我在音乐行业的所有经验都告诉我，外界对大胆概念和外来者抱有敌意。但团队坚持不懈，最终获得了2500万美元的风险投资，这在当时是一笔不小的数目。他们资金充裕，满怀希望，创立了Personics。

In the mid-1980s, I found myself working with some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley, and I watched as they hatched a plan to change how people consume music. The leader of this group, a former Rhodes scholar with a PhD from Harvard, envisioned a high-tech digital delivery system that would allow music fans to create customized playlists and download the songs for personal use. At the time I expressed my skepticism, not because of the concept—which was very exciting and far more consumer-driven than any of the existing music retail platforms back in those before-the-web days—but due to my fear that record labels would view this new technology as a threat rather than an opportunity. All my experiences with the music business had taught me to expect hostility toward outsiders and bold concepts. But the team persisted and eventually secured $25 million in venture capital, a sizable amount at the time. Flush with cash, and full of high hopes, they launched Personics.

几个月后，Personics 开始在 Tower Records 商店安装大型自助服务终端。这些笨重的硬件系统最早的音乐下载设备问世了，但当时存储用户播放列表的唯一可行介质是磁带。即便如此，这个新系统在很多方面都取得了突破。用户可以浏览目录，选择喜欢的歌曲，在自助服务终端输入选择，并当场创建自定义混音带。Personics 解决了一系列技术难题，从数据压缩到降噪。但正如我所料，唱片公司不愿授权他们的歌曲。如果无法获得所有新热门歌曲，Personics 注定会失败。该公司背后的远见卓识者们以惊人的准确性预见了音乐消费的未来——一个建立在个性化、定制化、数字访问和播放列表管理基础上的未来。但 20 世纪 80 年代的世界——尤其是当时对技术充满恐惧的音乐行业——还没有为此做好准备。

A few months later, Personics began installing large kiosks in Tower Records stores. These big clunky hardware systems were the first music download devices, but back then the only viable medium for storing a customer’s playlist was a cassette tape. Even so, this new system was a breakthrough in many ways. Users could browse a catalog, choose songs they liked, input their selections at the kiosk, and have a custom mixtape created on the spot. Personics had solved a host of technological problems, from data compression to noise reduction. But record labels were, as I predicted, reluctant to license their songs. Without access to all the new hits, Personics was doomed to failure. The visionaries behind the company had anticipated, with uncanny accuracy, the future of music consumption—a future built on personalization, customization, digital access, and playlist curation. But the world—and especially the technophobic music business—wasn’t ready for this in the 1980s.

然而，硅谷一年比一年壮大，财力雄厚，技术更先进，文化影响力也越来越大。与此同时，音乐产业却放弃了研发。早年，几乎所有音频技术的突破都是由唱片公司发明或商业化的，包括长播放唱片、45转单曲唱片、铝带麦克风、索尼随身听、八轨磁带、立体声和四声道音响，以及其他一些成功或失败的成果。RCA非常擅长推出新技术，堪称二十世纪中叶的苹果——它不仅是一家大型唱片公司，还是消费驱动技术的领导者，以及市场上最酷炫“设备”的发明者。但到了20世纪90年代末，消费电子和音乐产业开始分裂，各自走向了不同的方向。你甚至可以将其视为地理上的分歧：音乐产业在南加州蓬勃发展，借鉴好莱坞的灵感并凭借魅力蓬勃发展，而新的消费技术则越来越多地来自北加州，借鉴硅谷积累的专业知识和雄心。

Yet with each passing year, Silicon Valley got bigger and stronger, with deeper pockets, better technology, and greater cultural influence. Meanwhile, the music business gave up on R&D. In an earlier age, almost every breakthrough in audio technology had been invented or commercialized by a record company, including the long-playing record, the 45 rpm single, the ribbon microphone, the Sony Walkman, the 8-track tape, stereo and quadriphonic sound, and other hits and misses. RCA was so good at launching new technologies that it could be called the Apple equivalent of the middle decades of the twentieth century—not just a major record label, but also a leader in consumer-driven technologies and inventor of the coolest ‘devices’ on the market. But by the late 1990s, consumer electronics and music had splintered, each going its separate way. You could even view it as a geographical divide: the music business flourished in Southern California, taking its cues from Hollywood and thriving on glamour, whereas new consumer technologies increasingly came out of Northern California, drawing on the accumulated expertise and ambitions of Silicon Valley.

没人敢把这描述成南北之间的战争，但对于那些看透了表面之下裂痕和对抗的人来说，这越来越像是一场战争。就像之前的内战一样，北方会在这里获胜。他们太固执己见了。过去，南加州的娱乐公司对行业颠覆的准备不足。到了新千年伊始，硅谷正在选择平台和优先事项，并决定变革的步伐。快进到今天：音乐界最强大的力量都是技术驱动的公司——苹果、谷歌、Spotify、亚马逊，以及其他将歌曲视为单纯内容、更大商业模式组成部分的公司。

No one dared describe this as a war between North and South, but it increasingly looked like one to those who could see the fault lines and antagonisms beneath the surface. And like the Civil War of an earlier day, the North would prevail here. Too set in their ways, the entertainment companies of SoCal were ill prepared for industry disruption. By the dawn of the new millennium, Silicon Valley was choosing the platforms and priorities and dictating the pace of change. Fast-forward to the current day: the most powerful forces in music are all technology-driven companies—Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon, and others who view songs as mere content, one ingredient in a larger business model.

说唱片公司在科技公司蚕食其市场份额时无所作为，这并不准确。他们确实将金钱——以及大量不应有的信任——投入到他们业务的三个“L”中：诉讼、立法和游说。即使唱片公司无视消费娱乐技术史上最大的革命，他们的律师也忙于发出威胁和停止侵权通知书。在唱片公司陷入困境的这段时间里，他们也确实取得了一些成功。1998 年的《桑尼·博诺版权延长法案》创造了一种非同寻常的局面：企业对创意作品的控制权在美国建国初期最初为 14 年，可以选择再续期 14 年，而现在则可能达到 120 年甚至更久，具体取决于各种标准。相比之下，美国专利的有效期为 20 年——因此才出现了一种荒谬的情况：一种癌症治疗方法所获得的保护，仅仅相当于米莉·瓦尼利 (Milli Vanilli) 的歌曲或米老鼠动画片所获得的保护的一小部分。但我们可以肯定地预测，美国国会不会再延长版权保护期。《桑尼·博诺法案》通过几年后，苹果、谷歌以及其他在限制版权方面拥有既得利益的科技巨头，将拥有比娱乐公司更强大的游说力量。

It’s not accurate to say that record labels did absolutely nothing while tech companies ate their lunch. They did put money—and an immense amount of undeserved faith—into the three L’s of their business: litigation, legislation, and lobbying. Even as record labels ignored the biggest revolution in the history of consumer entertainment technology, their lawyers kept busy issuing threats and cease-and-desist letters. And they did enjoy some successes during their downward spiral. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998 created an extraordinary situation in which corporate control of a creative work, originally 14 years in the early days of the United States, with an option for a renewal for an extra 14 years, could now last 120 years or more, depending on various criteria. By comparison, a US patent expires after 20 years—hence the absurd situation that a cure for cancer would be granted only a fraction of the protection that a Milli Vanilli song or Mickey Mouse cartoon receives. But we can safely predict at this juncture that no more copyright extensions will come from the United States Congress. Just a few years after passage of the Sonny Bono Act, the dominant tech companies—Apple, Google, and others with a vested interest in limiting copyrights—would have more powerful lobbyists than the entertainment companies.

唱片公司战胜了备受欢迎的互联网音乐共享平台 Napster，如今可以被视为这场必败之战的最终胜利。唱片业倾尽全力投入这场斗争，并于 2001 年成功获得法院禁令，最终导致 Napster 破产。如果由美国唱片业协会 (RIAA) 主导这场斗争，接管 Napster 并将其平台扩展为从唱片公司到消费者的直接分销渠道——从而可能阻止iTunes、YouTube、亚马逊、Spotify和其他中介机构后来的主导地位。但这需要一种以满足消费者需求为基础的行业文化，而不是音乐巨头公司办公室里盛行的那种法律至上、威胁驱动、鸵鸟心态。

The record labels’ victory over Napster, a very popular Internet music-sharing platform, can now be viewed as a final battlefield triumph in a losing war. The industry put its full legal muscle into this fight, managing to get a court injunction in 2001 that led to the music service’s eventual bankruptcy. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the industry trade group leading the attack, would have been much wiser taking over Napster and expanding its platform as a direct distribution channel from music labels to consumers—thus possibly preventing the later dominance of iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, Spotify, and other intermediaries. But that would have required an industry culture based on meeting consumer needs, instead of the legalistic, threat-driven, head-in-the-sand worldview that prevailed within the corporate offices of the music moguls.

事实证明，音乐销量在1999年达到了顶峰——就在那一年，美国唱片业协会（RIAA）对Napster发起了法律诉讼。在接下来的十年里，行业收入下降了大约一半，即使是短暂的复苏也远不及20世纪的辉煌岁月。Napster和Bono的胜利将成为这种过时商业模式的最后欢呼。当苹果在2001年发布iPod时，唱片公司发现自己陷入了困境。苹果拥有比他们更大的政治影响力，而且消费者忠诚度也更高；iPod以及该公司的其他产品都是对客户偏好进行大量研究的成果，没有哪家唱片公司会“浪费”金钱去研究或满足这些偏好。而且，也没有哪家公司能比得上苹果那支强硬的法律团队（如今苹果雇佣了五百多名律师）。然而，iPod只是未来发展的一个预兆。 YouTube 的推出以及随后被谷歌收购表明，这个全球最强大的互联网平台旨在主导网络音乐分发，并尽可能少地支付费用。

As it turned out, music sales reached their peak in 1999—the very year that the RIAA launched its legal attack against Napster. Industry revenues would drop by roughly half over the next decade, and even the blips of recovery would never approach the glory years of the twentieth century. The Napster and Bono victories would be the last hurrahs of an antiquated business model. When Apple released the iPod in 2001, record labels found themselves in a quandary. Apple had more political clout than they did, and more consumer loyalty to boot; the iPod, and the company’s other products, were the result of reams of research into customer preferences that no record label would ever ‘waste’ money on studying or meeting. And no one could match Apple’s hardass legal staff, either (today Apple employs more than five hundred lawyers). And yet the iPod was only a harbinger of things to come. The launch of YouTube and its subsequent acquisition by Google signaled that the most powerful Internet platform in the world aimed to dominate the distribution of music over the web, and pay as little for it as possible.

试想一下，从商业角度来看，这意味着什么。对RCA来说，过去音乐出现在损益表中的销售项目中，是增长和利润的来源；而对谷歌来说，音乐是一项需要压缩的成本，需要将其保持在最低水平，甚至尽可能将其降至零。流媒体服务Spotify在其2015年致股东的年度报告中宣称：“我们不卖音乐。”该公司销售的是订阅和访问权；音乐只是经营成本。但这种经济模式的转变才刚刚开始体现这种更迭对音乐生态系统造成的损害。RCA和哥伦比亚在过去几十年里发明了新的音乐平台，但它们仍然……他们首先将自己视为创意人才的捍卫者。世界上大多数顶尖音乐家都与这些唱片公司签约，表演者和平台之间曾存在着一种共生关系。如今，这种情况结束了，因为人们从那些对发展音乐家事业毫无情感投入，更遑论经济投入的公司那里获取歌曲。这些科技巨头甚至会免费提供音乐，如果音乐有助于推进其他公司战略——例如销售设备或广告——他们有时确实会这么做。在某种程度上，贬低音乐的价值是一项核心战略^。1

Think for a moment of what this meant from a business standpoint. For RCA, in the old days, music showed up on the income statement in the sales lines, as a source of growth and profits; for Google, it is a cost that needs to be squeezed, kept to a minimum, perhaps even pushed to zero if possible. The streaming service Spotify, for its part, declared, in its 2015 annual report to shareholders, “We don’t sell music.” The company sells subscriptions and access; music is just the cost of doing business. But this shift in economics only begins to capture the damage to the music ecosystem caused by this changing of the guard. When RCA and Columbia invented new music platforms in previous decades, they still saw themselves first and foremost as champions of creative talent. Most of the leading musicians in the world were under contract to these labels, and a symbiotic relationship had existed between the performer and the platform. That now ended, as people got their songs from companies that had no emotional commitment, let alone financial commitment, to developing musicians’ careers. These tech giants would even give music away for free if it served to advance other corporate strategies—for example, selling devices or advertising—and they sometimes did just that. Devaluing music was, to some extent, a core strategy.¹

各大唱片公司自以为热衷于革命、颠覆和破坏，但当他们沦为受害者时，感觉就不那么好了。而这一次，来自硅谷的新霸主们很可能实现他们永久革命的梦想，一场不可逆转的旧秩序的颠覆。猫王和披头士乐队带来的挑战，与资本主义历史上最富有的企业苹果和谷歌的入侵相比，简直微不足道。一旦他们接管，还有什么能撼动他们呢？

The major record labels thought they loved revolution, subversion, and disruption, but it didn’t feel quite so good when they were on the receiving end. And this time the new overlords from Silicon Valley might very well achieve that dream of a permanent revolution, a toppling of the old guard that can never be reversed. The challenge Elvis and the Beatles presented was nothing in comparison to the incursions made by Apple and Google, the wealthiest enterprises in the history of capitalism. Once they take over, can anything dislodge them?

当这些新的威胁首次出现时，音乐大师们需要一场属于自己的革命，一场强大而激动人心的革命，让他们能够发号施令，并坚持自己的特权。他们想出的东西如果不是那么令人悲伤，也可以说是滑稽的：真人秀电视歌唱比赛是21世纪初娱乐业在音乐领域最大的创新。当然，这并非什么新鲜事。欧洲歌唱大赛自1956年以来一直是欧洲的年度盛事，哈莱姆区阿波罗剧院的“业余之夜”比赛可以追溯到20世纪30年代。事实上，即使是古人也有歌唱比赛。但这些比赛在新千年变成了一股失控的潮流，数十档真人秀节目都邀请那些渴望成为明星的人来取悦评委和在家的观众。尽管这些节目平庸乏味，但它们为这种祭祀仪式带来了不同的诠释，源源不断的音乐人有机会体验现代媒体明星的魅力，先是成为英雄，然后沦为受害者。正如吉拉德的理论所言，最终的赢家（或幸存者）诞生之前，需要经历一个漫长的竞争过程。这类比赛很容易上演和模仿，世界各地的电视市场也很快出现了类似的版本——在中国，观众对这类节目的沉迷程度之深，以至于政府最终不得不介入，限制其影响力。有人认为，中国当局真正担心的是，观众投票选出自己喜欢的歌手会滋生一种危险的民主倾向。但这种解读低估了歌曲本身的颠覆潜力，如今，歌曲在世界各地仍然面临着禁令和审查，就像过去一样。让人们选择自己喜欢的音乐永远是一种危险的自由，会带来政治后果。

When these new threats first appeared, the masters of music needed a revolution of their own, something so powerful and exciting that they could dictate terms and insist on their prerogatives. What they came up with would be funny if it weren’t so sad: the reality TV singing competition was the biggest innovation in music coming out of the entertainment industry in the early twenty-first century. Of course, this was hardly a new idea. The Eurovision Song Contest had been an annual event in Europe since 1956, and the “amateur night” competition at the Apollo Theater in Harlem dates back to the 1930s. In fact, even the ancients had their singing contests. But these competitions became an out-of-control fad in the new millennium, with dozens of reality TV shows featuring wannabe stars trying to please judges and the viewers at home. For all their banality, these shows offer a different twist on the sacrificial ritual, with a constant stream of musicians granted a brief taste of modern media stardom, first as heroes then as victims, just as Girard’s theory dictates, before a final winner (or survivor) emerges from the pack. Such contests are fairly simple to stage and imitate, and every TV market in the world soon had its own variants—in China, the audiences grew so addicted to these shows that the government eventually stepped in to limit their influence. Some have suggested that the Chinese authorities’ real fear is that the example of viewers voting for their favorite singer will inculcate a dangerous preference for democratic processes. But that interpretation underestimates the subversive potential of songs themselves, which continue to face prohibitions and censorship all around the world in the current day, just as they have in the past. Letting people pick their favorite music will always be a dangerous liberty with political ramifications.

事实证明，无需任何干预措施就能遏制歌唱比赛的热潮；它反而自我毁灭了，因为市场充斥着令人麻木的公式和雷同的模式。这类节目并没有完全消失，但却越来越带有一种荒诞、自嘲的特质——例如， 2019年初在福克斯电视网开播的《蒙面歌王》就体现了这一点，它是一场二线明星之间穿着滑稽服装的比赛。参赛者们会扮成贵宾犬、河马、兔子、独角兽或其他同样滑稽的化身登上舞台。或许，在这个概念的演变过程中，我们已经进入了动物献祭的阶段，但这总是在仪式的后期才出现，那时仪式已经开始失去它们的魅力。

As events turned out, no intervention has proven necessary to curtail the singing contest fad; it has destroyed itself by saturating the market with deadening formulas and look-alike formats. The shows haven’t quite disappeared, but increasingly take on an absurd, self-parodying quality—evident, for example, in The Masked Singer, launched on the Fox network in early 2019, a competition between second-tier celebrities wearing ridiculous costumes. Here the contestants take the stage in the guise of a poodle, a hippo, a rabbit, a unicorn, or some other equally buffoonish alter ego. Perhaps we have reached the animal sacrifice stage in the concept’s evolution, but that always comes late in the game when the ritual observances have already started to lose their mojo.

只有极少数超级巨星在这场喧嚣与骚动中脱颖而出。凯莉·克拉克森和凯莉·安德伍德都凭借在《美国偶像》电视节目中的胜利而真正成为明星，就像早年欧洲歌唱大赛帮助ABBA和席琳·迪翁成为白金唱片艺术家一样。但尽管获得了大众媒体的关注，这些电视比赛的大多数获胜者都从事着平淡无奇的职业。在很多情况下，失败者比获胜者更成功。单向乐队在《英国偶像》节目中排名第三，但五年后，这支流行男子乐队的年收入就超过1亿美元。十二岁时，碧昂丝·诺尔斯和她的乐队 Girl's Tyme（后来的 Destiny's Child）在《星探》中被淘汰，《星探》是后来真人秀节目的先驱之一，但她后来却登上了音乐界的顶峰。说实话，很难想象任何真正的创新者或叛逆者能在这些人为的环境中取得胜利。前卫的表演者偶尔会以参赛者的身份出现在电视屏幕上，但总是在最后一轮之前就被淘汰出局。即使是对评委的一句不雅评论也足以浇灭观众的热情，让他们早早离开。任何真正渴望成为下一个约翰·列侬或鲍勃·迪伦的人，更不用说席德·维瑟斯或科特·柯本了，可能都无法通过第一轮筛选。原因很明显：这些节目不会改变主流观众的音乐品味；它们只是反映了居家选民根深蒂固的偏好。学习音乐史的学生不可避免地会想起文艺复兴时期的名歌手歌唱比赛，该比赛奖励平淡无奇、没有错误和无害的举止。

Only a tiny number of superstar acts have emerged from all this sound and fury. Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood both parlayed victory in the American Idol TV show into genuine stardom, just as in an earlier day the Eurovision contest helped turn ABBA and Céline Dion into platinum-selling recording artists. But most of the victors of these TV contests have pursued lackluster careers despite the mass media exposure. In many instances, the losers have enjoyed more success than the winners. One Direction finished third on The X Factor, but five years later this pop boy band was earning more than $100 million per year. At age twelve, Beyoncé Knowles got eliminated along with her group Girl’s Tyme (which later became Destiny’s Child) on Star Search, one of the forerunners of the later reality shows, but she would later rise to the top of the music world. In truth, it’s hard to envision any real innovator or renegade emerging victorious in these artificial settings. Edgy performers occasionally find their way onto TV screens as contestants, but are invariably voted off the show long before the final round. Even a single intemperate remark to a judge can be sufficient to quell audience enthusiasm and guarantee early departure. Anyone who really aspires to becoming the next John Lennon or Bob Dylan, let alone Sid Vicious or Kurt Cobain, probably won’t survive the first cut. And for an obvious reason: these shows don’t change the musical tastes of mainstream audiences; they simply reflect ingrained preferences of stay-at-home voters. A student of music history is inevitably reminded of the singing contests of the Meistersingers back in the Renaissance, which rewarded blandness, lack of mistakes, and an inoffensive demeanor.

即便如此，歌唱比赛的兴起也反映出一种真实的需求。音乐行业一直以来都依赖于外来者和新鲜血液。在某种程度上，这些全国性的比赛与唱片公司在20世纪20年代进行的录音实地考察并无太大区别。在这两种情况下，商业利益都旨在为音乐创新创建一个标准化的流程。同样的愿望，即开发一个准客观的体系来推出新的商业艺人，激励着近几十年来的艺人经纪人通过试镜组建自己的乐队——随着音乐行业变得更加谨慎和公式化，这种方法越来越受到欢迎。其中一些艺人，例如新街边男孩、后街男孩​​和辣妹组合，一度获得了巨大的商业成功，尽管在最初的核心受众——青少年成长起来后，他们的影响力就没那么大了。正如过去几十年甚至几个世纪积累下来的例子所证明的那样，音乐的真正创新来自于颠覆，而不是标准化。任何试图通过真人秀节目或公式化的乐队来发起一场真正的音乐革命几乎从一开始就注定要失败。

Even so, the rise of the singing contest reflected a genuine need. The music business had always relied on outsiders and new blood. To some degree, these nationwide competitions weren’t much different from the recording field trips the labels had undertaken back in the 1920s. In both cases, business interests aimed to create a standardized process for music innovation. This same desire, the ambition to develop a quasi-objective system for launching new commercial acts, has inspired talent managers in recent decades to build their own bands out of auditions—an approach increasingly embraced by the music industry as it became more cautious and formula-driven. And some of these acts, such as New Kids on the Block, the Backstreet Boys, and the Spice Girls, enjoyed tremendous commercial success for a time, although without much staying power after their initial core audience of adolescents and teens grew up. As the accumulated examples of the previous decades—even centuries—attest, true innovation in music comes from disruption, not standardization. Any attempt to mount a genuine revolution in music out of a reality TV show or a formula-constructed band is almost doomed to failure from the start.

过去，音乐总是通过新流派的出现而焕发新生——这种情况每隔几年就会发生一次。在二十世纪的进程中，布鲁斯、爵士、摇滚、嘻哈和其他一些反叛风格重新定义并重振了原本可能停滞不前的乐坛。然而，在数字时代的早期，情况似乎截然相反：新兴的流派和子流派实在太多，但没有一个拥有足够的影响力在主流社会掀起一场革命，当然更达不到20世纪20年代爵士时代或“爱之夏”时期的水平。事实上，当流媒体服务Spotify决定定义每种音乐风格时，该公司列出了1387个类别。（例如：电子拉丁音乐、新柔和音乐、基督教舞曲、电影回响贝斯、实验室音乐、跺脚舞曲、神经放克音乐和流行圣诞音乐。）

In the past, music has always revitalized itself through the emergence of a new genre—it happens every few years. During the course of the twentieth century, blues, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and other insurgent styles redefined and reenergized a scene that might otherwise have stagnated. Yet in the early years of the digital age, the opposite seemed to be happening: there were simply too many emerging genres and subgenres, and none with sufficient clout to mount a revolution in mainstream society, certainly not at the level experienced during the Jazz Age of the 1920s or the Summer of Love. In fact, when the streaming service Spotify decided to define every music style, the company came up with a list of 1,387 categories. (Some examples: Electro-Latino, Neo-Mellow, Christian Dance, Cinematic Dubstep, Laboratorio, Stomp and Whittle, Neurofunk, and Pop Christmas.)

这种音乐风格的扩散与从薯片到牙膏等其他产品类别的品牌延伸并无二致，在这些产品类别中，消费者的偏好被不断细分，以找到愿意为更定制化的产品支付溢价的群体。但是，微观管理利基市场的成功，会在最终用户中灌输一种舒适的自满情绪和狭隘的关注点，从而破坏更大规模变革的机会。当推向极端时，听众关于听音乐的决定开始变得像酒吧里的顾客一样，浏览一长串微型啤酒厂的啤酒单。在一个有限的环境中，整个选择过程受到严格控制，意外被降到最低，从而产生一种不受约束的选择的幻觉。

This proliferation of musical styles is no different from the brand extensions in other product categories, from potato chips to toothpaste, in which consumer preferences are sliced and diced in constant attempts to identify a demographic group willing to pay a premium for something more customized. But the very success in micromanaging niche markets, which instills a comfortable complacency and a narrowing of focus among end-users, undermines opportunities for transformative change on a larger scale. When pushed to an extreme, audience decisions about listening to music start to resemble patrons at a pub reviewing an endless list of microbrewery beers. There’s an illusion of unconstrained choice in a circumscribed environment where the whole selection process is stringently controlled and surprises are kept to a minimum.

21世纪初，尽管生态系统中不断涌现出一些微型细分市场，摇滚、流行、乡村和嘻哈这四大商业音乐类别仍然占据着市场主导地位。其他传统音乐流派或许能够创新，并创造出顶级艺术家——正如古典音乐、爵士乐和其他领域持续发生的那样——但它们既无法像辉煌时期那样创造利润，也无法改变社会。

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, four commercial music categories still dominated the marketplace, despite the constant addition of micro-niches in the ecosystem: rock, pop, country, and hip-hop. Other traditional genres might innovate and create artists of the highest tier—as continued to happen in classical music, jazz, and other fields—but they could neither generate profits nor change society the way they had during their glory days.

其他音乐风格能挑战这四大巨头吗？电子舞曲（EDM）脱颖而出，成为最有前途的音乐。候选人。从旧迪斯科运动的灰烬中崛起的舞厅场景，拥抱了一系列数字时代的创新，市场上推出的每一款新软件包或硬件设备都扩展了从业者可用的工具。这片沃土般的实验田已经为新的生活方式驱动型音乐类型创造了充满活力的城市栖息地，并催生了底特律电子乐、芝加哥浩室音乐、伦敦回响贝斯以及其他本地和区域场景的兴起。几乎每个季节都会带来一种新的流行风格，随着新技术逐渐颠覆旧有的惯例，它们在商业音乐中形成了强大的变革力量，不断拓展着前沿人士的声音范围。

Could any other style of music challenge the four leaders? Electronic dance music, or EDM, stood out as the most promising candidate. Rising from the ashes of the old disco movement, the dance club scene had embraced a host of digital-age innovations, and each new software package or hardware setup put on the market expanded the tools at hand for practitioners. This fertile field for experimentation had already created vibrant urban habitats for new lifestyle-driven genres, leading to the rise of Detroit techno music, Chicago house music, London dubstep, and other local and regional scenes. Almost every season seemed to bring another trendy style into the mix, and as new technologies undermined old practices, they created a potent force of change in commercial music, repeatedly expanding the sound palettes of those at the cutting edge.

然而，事实证明，技术在这里的重要性往往不如围绕其传播和使用的仪式性活动。事实上，令人不禁要问，尽管电子舞曲（EDM）有着未来主义的外衣，但它在多大程度上重现了音乐起源之初那种令人陶醉的恍惚仪式。电子舞曲在锐舞派对和俱乐部中焕发活力，这恰恰是音乐作为通往超越和改变心智状态之门的力量的最新体现。与电子舞曲（EDM）场景最相关的非法毒品被称为“摇头丸”（Ecstasy），这绝非巧合——这个词也被用来描述传统神秘主义者的心态以及古代酒神节参与者的催眠状态。米尔恰·伊利亚德（Mircea Eliade）于1951年出版了他开创性的研究《萨满教》，甚至将他的著作命名为《古代摇头丸技术》（Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy）。锐舞是现代的替代品。然而，当今每一种主流音乐流派都至少在一定程度上呼应了史前歌曲的一些元素。摇滚明星唤起了人们对古代象征性暴力仪式中替罪羊的联想。乡村歌手重现了牧民依靠音乐抚慰家畜的田园牧歌，歌颂了家和炉边的稳定生活。嘻哈歌手回归了单声道的吟唱，这种吟唱曾将最初的人类社群，也就是最古老的“社区”凝聚在一起。流行歌手用情色的风格和舞步吸引观众，让我们想起催生情歌的生育仪式。在这种语境下，EDM 聚会是音乐对最持久的情感的现代运用。人类的困境：如何摆脱单调乏味的当下，获得幸福，或者至少是短期的、受歌曲启发的、通过化学辅助获得的幸福。

Yet the technologies here often proved less important than the ritualistic activities surrounding their dissemination and use. Indeed, it’s a cause for wonder how much EDM, despite its futuristic trappings, re-creates the ecstatic trance rituals of music’s earliest origins. The rave parties and club scenes where it comes to life stand out as the latest demonstration of music’s power as a gateway to transcendence and altered mind states. It’s hardly a coincidence that the illegal drug most associated with the EDM scene carries the street name Ecstasy—the exact same term used to describe the traditional mystic’s mindset and the hypnotic state of the participant at an ancient bacchanalia. When Mircea Eliade published his seminal study Shamanism in 1951, he even subtitled his book Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. The rave is the modern alternative. Then again, every major music genre today echoes, at least in part, some of the imperatives of prehistoric song. The rock star evokes the scapegoat from ancient rituals of symbolic violence. The country artist re-creates the pastoral strains of the herders, who relied on music to soothe domesticated animals, and celebrates the stable life of home and hearth. The hip-hopper returns to the monophonic chant that served to unite the first human communities, the oldest ’hoods of them all. The pop star draws an audience with erotic stylings and dance moves that remind us of the fertility rituals that gave birth to the love song. The EDM gathering, in this context, is the modern application of music to the most persistent human dilemma: how to rise out of the humdrum here-and-now and achieve bliss, or at least its short-term, song-inspired, chemically assisted equivalent.

当然，每种音乐类型都远不止重复旧模式。在这些永恒的根基之上，层层叠叠地叠加着奢华的意义和声音。但它们也回归了最初的原则，原因很简单，音乐远不止于娱乐。即使在21世纪，音乐仍然是我们应对生活中各种根本挑战的有力工具，无论是作为个人还是作为更大社群的成员。媒体和商业利益或许将歌曲视为一种逃避现实的消遣，但每一种先进的有目的的活动——从高水平运动到脑外科手术——都旨在利用音乐来提升成果。EDM表演者（或者更常见的称呼是制作人和DJ）在舞台上或在工作室工作时，周围环绕着各种各样的高科技设备，但歌曲本身却是所有技术中最古老的，其古老性难以被轻视。在21世纪，如同在人类发展的每个先前阶段一样，音乐是变革力量的可靠源泉。

Of course, each of these genres does much more than repeat old patterns. Lavish superstructures of signification and sound are layered onto these timeless foundations. But they also return to first principles, for the simple reason that music is always more than mere entertainment. Even in the twenty-first century, music serves as a dynamic tool for dealing with the fundamental challenges of our lives, both as individuals and as members of larger communities. Media and business interests may treat songs as idle escapism, but every advanced form of purposive activity—from high-performance athletics to brain surgery—aims to harness music to improve results. EDM performers (or producers and DJs, as they are more often called) are surrounded by all sorts of high-tech gear when they show up onstage or work in their studio, but song itself is the oldest technology of all, and hardly to be scorned for its antiquity. In the twenty-first century, as in every previous stage in human development, music is a reliable source of transformative power.

然而，即使电子舞曲 (EDM) 有望吸引新的年轻听众，唱片公司却未能充分把握这一机遇。这种音乐的影响力只有在融入到活动中才能最大程度地发挥，而非仅仅作为数字音乐。流媒体平台或智能手机应用程序无法提供真正的 EDM 体验。歌迷必须亲自前往 EDM 朝圣。一些全球知名的旅游胜地——伊比沙岛、果阿、拉斯维加斯——都大肆宣扬与 EDM 的联系，并将其作为吸引游客的诱因。但游客来到伊比沙岛不仅仅是为了欣赏一位艺术家或一首歌曲：他们想要一种完全沉浸式的生活方式体验，这种体验无法被互联网商品化和销售。即使是像 Skrillex、Calvin Harris、David Guetta 和 deadmau5 这样的超级巨星 EDM 制作人，有时也会被当作更大产业的一部分。或者，当他们被唱片公司招募时，他们发现自己正在为说唱和流行歌手提供技术支持——这些歌手虽然是精英，收入丰厚，但仍然需要更大牌的明星，比如蕾哈娜或贾斯汀·比伯，才能达到令人垂涎的超过十亿的YouTube观看次数。在不同的文化环境下，大师们电子音乐的先驱们或许会崛起，成为现代的“萨满”，动员整整一代人，定义新的生活方式。但在新千年这个金钱至上、潮流至上的音乐世界里，他们更有可能发现自己被挤进一个狭小的圈子，沦为受雇的节拍制作人，像过去的流浪吟游诗人一样，只不过手里拿着笔记本电脑而不是七弦琴。

But even as EDM shows promise for mobilizing a new young audience, record labels aren’t well equipped to take advantage of this opportunity. This music exerts its greatest impact when embedded in an event, not as a digital track. You can’t deliver the real EDM experience via a streaming platform or smartphone app. Fans must make a pilgrimage instead. Certain global destinations—Ibiza, Goa, Las Vegas—have touted their associations with EDM and use it as a lure for tourism. But visitors come to Ibiza for more than an artist or song: they want a total lifestyle immersion experience that resists commodification and sale over the Internet. Even superstar EDM producers, such as Skrillex, Calvin Harris, David Guetta, and deadmau5, sometimes get treated as one ingredient in a much larger enterprise. Or, when enlisted by record labels, they find themselves serving as tech support for rap and pop artists—elite and highly paid, but nonetheless requiring the participation of a bigger name, a Rihanna or Justin Bieber, to reach those coveted billion-plus YouTube views. In a different sociocultural environment, the masters of electronic music might rise up as modern-day shamans, mobilizing a whole generation and defining new ways of life. But in the cash-hungry and trend-devouring music world of the new millennium, they are more likely to find themselves squeezed into a narrow box as beatmakers for hire, wandering troubadours like those of yore, but carrying a laptop rather than a lyre.

音乐作为实体专辑或数字内容的商品化曾是一个机遇，但如今却日益成为一种负担。当你通过微交易将歌曲货币化，将其转化为低价产品或服务，或者有时仅仅作为赠品来推销订阅或设备时，你很难再将歌曲视为一种魔力。但尽管这些劣化已经发生，但至少对于那些懂得如何利用它的人来说，它的魔力依然存在。我们不能完全忽视这些交易，如果我们真的在乎歌曲的话。新千年音乐创作经济的巨大转变不仅影响着现金流，也改变了音乐本身。从某种程度上来说，这些改变令人兴奋。中介机构的瓦解和全球互联互通的兴起，使得音乐以前所未有的速度在世界各地传播。来自韩国和日本的流行歌曲在欧洲找到了歌迷，开辟了几年前还无法想象的传播之路。来自马里的沙漠布鲁斯音乐，或来自泰国的电音乐队Molam，在美国都能收获意想不到的追捧——有时甚至比在本土获得的赞誉还要多。在新西兰或澳大利亚上传的音乐视频，转眼间就能传遍全球。之前只在自家车库里为虚拟观众表演的乐队，如今无需试镜或签约唱片公司，就能迅速走红。想想看，这一切也是一种魔力。

The commodification of music as physical albums or digital content was once an opportunity, but increasingly it’s a burden. It’s hard to see songs as magic when you have monetized them in micro-transactions, turned them into low-priced products or services, or sometimes just giveaways to sell a subscription or device. But the magic remains, despite these degradations, at least for those who know how to tap into it. And we can’t disregard those transactions entirely, not if we care about the songs. The dramatic shift in the economics of music creation in the new millennium impacts more than cash flow—it also changes the tunes themselves. In some ways, the alterations are exciting. The collapse of intermediaries and the rise of global connectivity allow music to move around the world with unprecedented speed. Pop songs from Korea and Japan find fans in Europe, forging paths of dissemination impossible to imagine just a few years ago. A desert blues sound from Mali or an electrified molam band from Thailand can gain an unexpected following in the United States—sometimes even more acclaim than they enjoy at home. A music video uploaded in New Zealand or Australia can be viewed across the globe moments later. Bands that previously played only to imaginary audiences in someone’s garage can go viral without ever having to pass an audition or sign a record contract. All of this is a kind of magic, too, when you think about it.

在前文中，我们反复见证了音乐如何在文化熔炉和港口城市蓬勃发展。互联网的荣耀在于，它把我们所有人都置于这个熔炉之中。无论我们身处何方，我们的视角都是一个面向整个世界及其所有资源的门户。即使数字经济对音乐生态系统构成了如此大的威胁，但这至少值得我们珍惜和庆祝。

We have seen repeatedly, in the preceding pages, how music thrives in cultural melting pots and port cities. The glory of the Internet is that it has placed all of us in the midst of this melting pot. Wherever we live now, our vantage point is a portal facing the entire world and all it has to offer. Even if the digital economy threatens so much of the music ecosystem, this at least is something to cherish and celebrate.

然而，唉，威胁是真实存在的。经济和技术领域的颠覆给那些试图以音乐为生的人带来了巨大的障碍。互联网让新艺术家更容易发布和传播他们的音乐，但成功的回报却显著减少。录制音乐的收入大幅下降。面对来自各方的虚拟竞争，夜总会纷纷关门大吉。通过流媒体和授权等新收入来源的兴起，几乎无法弥补旧收入来源的消失。诚然，作为一名音乐人谋生一直很困难，但在这个数千万歌迷决定不再需要拥有专辑甚至不再需要购买数字下载的时代，这几乎是不可能的。一些人将音乐订阅服务视为救星，但音乐人真的能用微交易的微薄份额来支付租金吗？在这种新环境下，经济模式往往更倾向于科技公司而不是音乐创作者——而后者现在被贴上了“内容提供商”这个毫无吸引力的标签。科技巨头们争夺地盘，音乐人只能袖手旁观，命运悬而未决。就连最有才华的艺术家也不得不承受由此带来的后果。然而，在一个日益将歌曲视为亏本买卖、免费赠送以推销其他商品的体系中，音乐人该如何生存下去呢？

But, alas, the threats are real. The disruptions in the economic and technological spheres have created enormous hurdles for those who seek to make a livelihood out of music. The Internet has made it easier for new artists to release and distribute their music, but the rewards for success have diminished markedly. Revenues from recorded music have collapsed. Nightclubs have closed their doors in the face of virtual competition from so many directions. The rise of new income sources, via streaming and licensing, hardly begins to compensate for the disappearance of the old ones. True, it has always been hard to make a living as a musician, but it’s almost impossible in an age when tens of millions of fans decide they no longer need to own an album or even purchase a digital download. Some look to music subscription services as a savior, but can musicians really pay the rent with micro-shares of micro-transactions? In this new environment, economic models tend to reward tech companies more than music creators—who are now branded with the uninspiring title of “content providers.” Musicians watch from the sidelines, their fate in the balance, as tech behemoths battle over turf, and even the most talented artists must live with the consequences. But how will they manage to thrive in a system that increasingly views songs as loss leaders given away for free in order to sell something else?

最成功的艺术家往往会效仿苹果和谷歌——他们将自己打造成多功能品牌，有时作为企业家赚的钱比作为表演者赚的钱还要多。如今，当《福布斯》发布其年度最富有音乐家榜单时，唱片销量对排名的影响却出奇地小。Jay-Z 最近跃居榜首，但主要得益于他在多家企业的股权，包括 Armand de Brignac 香槟和 D'Ussé 干邑白兰地。他险胜同为说唱歌手的 Sean Combs（更为人熟知的绰号是吹牛老爹），后者的大部分收入来自时尚和酒类。碧昂丝在备受赞誉的专辑《Lemonade》发行后不久，就超越泰勒·斯威夫特，成为全球收入最高的女音乐家，歌迷们或许会以为她的经济成功主要建立在唱片上。但碧昂丝的商业帝国实际上是碧昂丝的投资组合高度多元化，涵盖时装系列、鞋履品牌、香水、演出、门票销售、流媒体服务 Tidal 的股份（她的丈夫 Jay-Z 于 2015 年以 5600 万美元收购了该服务），以及与百事可乐、Emporio Armani、美国运通、Tommy Hilfiger 等公司建立的各种合作关系。仅在香水领域，碧昂丝的产品销售额就已达到约 5 亿美元。

The most successful artists tend to follow the lead of Apple and Google—they turn themselves into multipurpose brands, sometimes earning more money as entrepreneurs than they ever could as performers. When Forbes publishes its annual list of the wealthiest musicians, music sales now have surprisingly little impact on the rankings. Jay-Z recently rose to the top of that list, but mostly because of his equity stakes in various business, including Armand de Brignac champagne and D’Ussé cognac. He narrowly beat out fellow rapper Sean Combs, better known as Puff Daddy, who generates most of his income from fashion and liquor. When Beyoncé overtook Taylor Swift to become the highest-earning female musician in the world, shortly after the launch of her lauded Lemonade album, fans might have assumed that her financial success was built primarily on recordings. But Beyoncé’s business empire is actually a highly diversified portfolio involving a fashion line, a shoe brand, perfumes, acting gigs, ticket sales, shares in the Tidal streaming service (which her spouse Jay-Z acquired for $56 million in 2015), and various partnerships with Pepsi, Emporio Armani, American Express, Tommy Hilfiger, and other companies. In just the world of fragrances, Beyoncé has sold around half a billion dollars’ worth of product.

并非每位音乐人都具备创业成功的技能。坎耶·韦斯特在尝试创办各种企业的过程中背负了超过5000万美元的债务。即使他发行了大获成功的专辑《Yeezus》，并开启了一场仅18场就收入2500万美元的巡回演出，韦斯特仍然需要依靠银行贷款和投资者来支付账单。在过去，陷入财务困境的音乐人会指望专辑销售和巡演来解决问题，但在21世纪的音乐经济中，这些往往会引发财务问题。韦斯特甚至在推特上请求Facebook创始人马克·扎克伯格向他苦苦挣扎的商业帝国投资10亿美元。这看似荒谬，实则不然。在一个科技巨头掌控音乐的世界里，想要跻身顶尖的艺人必须像科技巨头一样行事。在某些情况下，即使是超级巨星也不得不将歌曲视为财务上的损失，是维持品牌在其他更有利可图的领域生存所必需的沉没成本。

Not every musician has the skills to succeed as an entrepreneur. Kanye West ran up more than $50 million in debt in his attempts to launch various businesses. Even as he released his successful Yeezus album and embarked on a supporting tour that brought in $25 million for just eighteen concerts, West needed to rely on bank loans and investors to pay his bills. In an earlier day, a musician in a tight financial spot would look to album sales and touring to fix the problem, but those often cause the financial problems in twenty-first-century music economics. West even tweeted a request for Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, to invest a billion dollars in his struggling business empire. It seems absurd, but really isn’t. In a world where tech titans control music, performers who hope to rise to the top must act like tech titans themselves. In some instances, even a superstar musician has to view songs as financial write-offs, sunk costs necessary to keep the brand alive in other, more lucrative categories.

历史上从未有过哪个时期音乐领域遭遇如此巨大的科技和经济冲击。然而，在这种混乱之中，艺术依然以某种方式蓬勃发展——尽管我们能够发现，全球各地音乐家凭借着技术工具和前所未有的强大发行平台，开展着激动人心且多元化的活动，而那些自认为掌控着音乐界的商业权力掮客则日益缩小了视野，两者之间的鸿沟正在不断扩大。仅考虑后者，人们可能会得出这样的结论：流行音乐的情感正在吞噬整个歌曲世界。泰勒·斯威夫特最初以乡村音乐明星的身份成名，但在拥抱流行音乐后，她的声望达到了顶峰。凯蒂·佩里原本录制的是基督教摇滚，但后来转行流行音乐，并售出了上亿张唱片。收入最高的嘻哈艺人和电子舞曲制作人寻求与顶级流行歌星合作，从而吸引跨界听众。亚洲音乐很少能与西方听众产生共鸣，直到日本的J-Pop和韩国的K-Pop明星证明，他们也能像美国人一样玩转音乐。即使是爵士乐和古典乐也未能免受这种对流行音乐的需求的影响。纯粹主义者总是用各种说法来哀叹扩大听众群体的动力，但推动跨界音乐的不仅仅是金钱和权力。一种被称为“流行乐观主义”的音乐评论学派应运而生，旨在培育和颂扬这种主流的新情感。

No period in history has seen so much technological and economic disruption in the music field. Yet in the midst of this chaos, artistry still somehow manages to emerge and flourish—although an increasing divide can be detected between the exciting and diverse activities of musicians around the globe, armed with technological tools and distribution platforms of unprecedented power, and the narrowing focus of the commercial power brokers who believe they run the music world. Considering only the latter, one might conclude that a pop sensibility is devouring the entire world of song. Taylor Swift first made her mark as a country star, but hit the heights of stardom after embracing pop. Katy Perry was recording Christian rock, but switched to pop and sold a hundred million records. The highest-earning hip-hop artists and EDM producers seek out the crossover audience that comes from collaborations with top-tier pop stars. Asian music rarely connected with audiences in the West until the stars of J-Pop from Japan and K-Pop from Korea showed they could play this game as well as Americans. Even jazz and classical music aren’t immune to this demand for pop-oriented music. In every idiom, purists lament the push for audience expansion, but it’s not just money and power that are pushing for crossover. A whole school of music criticism known as poptimism has emerged to nurture and celebrate the dominant new sensibility.

“流畅的音色是当今时代的标志，”哲学家韩秉哲最近宣称。“它连接着杰夫·昆斯的雕塑、iPhone和巴西式脱毛。”韩在生活中处处都能看到这种流畅的音色，并将其与一种积极的意识形态联系起来。这种意识形态将社交互动简化为Facebook上的“点赞”，并提倡使用PS图片，以打造完美无瑕的面容和完美曲线的身材。在他对流畅音色崇拜的描述中，他并没有提及当代音乐，但当代音乐也融入了时代精神，至少从那些被大力宣传的艺术家和市场的需求来看是如此。在经历了数十年的非洲化弯音和复杂音色之后，热门歌曲正在回归纯粹的毕达哥拉斯音调，有时歌手会直接将音高调到正中央，或者在很多情况下，之后会通过自动调音器进行调整，使其达到完美状态。有时，制作人仿佛已经忘记了整个非洲歌唱革命，19世纪90年代的声乐理想又回归了。和声也经历了类似的“白化”。如今的流行音乐不仅摒弃了布鲁斯和弦，而且常常不再依赖三全音——几个世纪以来，这种尖锐的音程一直驱动着功能性和声。切分音已基本从旋律和支持节奏中消失，后者如今更倾向于无缝的模式，流畅而重复。如果你从一张白纸开始重新设计音乐，目标是达到最大的流畅度，那么这些正是你会做出的选择^。2

“The smooth is the signature of the present time,” philosopher Byung-Chul Han recently announced. “It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, iPhones and Brazilian waxing.” Han sees this smoothness everywhere and links it to the same ideology of positivity that reduces social interactions to “likes” on Facebook and promotes the use of photoshopped images, with their fantasy of blemish-free visages and perfectly contoured bodies. He doesn’t mention contemporary music in his account of the cult of the smooth, but it also participates in the zeitgeist, at least judging by the most heavily promoted artists and the imperatives of the marketplace. After decades of Africanized bent notes and complex timbres, hit songs are returning to pure Pythagorean tones, sometimes delivered dead-on the center of the pitch by the singer or, in many instances, later manipulated into perfection by Auto-Tune tinkering. At times, it’s almost as if producers have forgotten the whole African revolution in singing, and the vocal ideals of the 1890s have returned. Harmonies have undergone a comparable whitening. The current-day pop sensibility hasn’t just abandoned blues chords, but often operates without any reliance on tritones, that biting interval that has driven functional harmony for centuries. Syncopations have mostly disappeared from melodies and supporting rhythms, the latter now tending to seamless patterns, smooth and repetitive. If you were redesigning music from a blank page, with the goal of achieving maximum smoothness, these are precisely the choices you would make.²

然而，美学史上最徒劳的想法是认为创造冲动可以被驯服为精准无误、规律无阻的模式。这根本不是事实，我们对人脑对艺术反应的日益认识表明了这种想法是多么的错误。前额叶皮层的神经回路会被意想不到的音乐成分所刺激。我们渴望重复的模式，但我们也渴望对其进行破坏。从音乐的角度来看，颠覆实际上是我们与生俱来的。然而，对音乐对称性的追求很少有像今天这样强烈。即使是最炙手可热的录音室鼓手现在也会被例行要求跟着节拍器演奏——节拍器是一种稳定的节拍器脉冲，确保不偏离数学上纯粹的节奏。有时，鼓手的全部贡献会被缩短为几秒钟的音乐，几小节的打击乐，通过复制粘贴功能在整个音轨中重复。我们已经达到了这样一个境界：绝对完美的节拍，恒久不变且精准无误，可以驱动我们所有的歌曲。奇怪的是，这种做法重现了一个世纪前的趋势，当时Aeolian自动钢琴公司的工程师们试图在音乐表演中强加类似的规律。这项有时被称为量化的技术在当时被证明是一种灾难性的制约——当歌曲被数学控制时，听起来根本不够好——但如今，它以新的数字形式重新出现。

Yet the most futile notion in the history of aesthetics is the concept that creative impulses can be tamed into patterns of neat precision and frictionless regularity. It’s simply not true, and our growing awareness of the human brain’s reaction to art demonstrates just how wrongheaded it is. The neural circuits in the prefrontal cortex are excited by musical ingredients that are unexpected. We crave the repetitive pattern, but we also hunger for its disruption. Subversion, from a musical standpoint, is actually hardwired into our bodies. Yet the quest for musical symmetry has rarely been more intense than in the current day. Even the hottest studio session drummers are now routinely asked to play along with a click track—a steady metronome pulse that ensures no deviation from a mathematically pure tempo. Sometimes the drummer’s whole contribution is reduced to a few seconds of music, a couple bars of percussion that are repeated with a copy-and-paste function throughout the entire track. We have reached a point where an absolutely perfect beat, unchanging and precise, can propel all our songs. In an odd way, this practice repeats a trend from a century ago, when the engineers at the Aeolian player piano company attempted to impose a similar regularity on musical performances. This technology, sometimes called quantization, proved to be a disastrous constraint back then—the song simply didn’t sound as good when it was controlled by mathematics—but it has reemerged today in a new digital guise.

正如自动钢琴的例子所示，前几代人也曾试图将音乐的流畅性最大化。但流畅的歌曲迟早会被更具颠覆性的声音所取代。19世纪，出版商兜售旨在以平和感伤的主题取悦所有人的客厅歌曲，但非裔美国音乐改变了这一切。在20世纪，一系列音乐流派——爵士乐、摇滚乐、嘻哈音乐——也做了同样的事情，每一种新进入的音乐都以事先无法预测的决定性干预颠覆了演唱风格和更广泛的社会。在每一次例子中，流畅的音乐都被某种更强大、更不礼貌、更具争议性的东西所取代。这次故事的结局会有所不同吗？或许不会。四千年的音乐史告诉我们并非如此。

As the player piano example shows, previous generations also tried to maximize smoothness in music. But the smooth songs have always been displaced, sooner or later, by more subversive sounds. In the nineteenth century, publishers peddled parlor songs that aimed to please everybody with inoffensive, sentimental themes, but African American music changed all that. During the course of the twentieth century, a series of music genres—jazz, rock, hip-hop—did the same, each new entrant disrupting singing styles and the broader society in decisive interventions that could never have been predicted in advance. In each instance, the smooth music was swept aside by something stronger, less polite, more controversial. Will the story end differently this time? Probably not. Four thousand years of music history tell us otherwise.

有时，音乐生态系统中的每个压力点似乎都想把歌曲变成纯粹的娱乐。（或者更糟，怀旧娱乐——看看近年来重聚巡演、退休巡演、致敬专辑以及职业生涯后期的成功就知道了。）尽管好莱坞和硅谷之间存在着种种表面上的冲突，但这或许是唱片公司和运营数字平台的技术官僚们唯一达成共识的问题。这两个对手都希望一切尽可能顺利。他们甚至可以援引学术研究来支持自己的立场。当他们把歌曲视为大众娱乐的“内容”时，他们与哈佛大学心理学家史蒂芬·平克及其简化论断并无太大区别，后者认为音乐只是大脑的“听觉芝士蛋糕”，类似于娱乐性毒品或六罐百威啤酒。 “内容”这个术语本身就意味着音乐是一种普通的东西，是一种可替代的商品，没有社会意义或更大的目的——用平克的话来说，“没有生存价值”——当然，除了为其提供者创造利润^。3

At times it seems as if every pressure point in the music ecosystem wants to turn songs into mere entertainment. (Or even worse, nostalgic entertainment—note the proliferation in recent years of reunion tours, retirement tours, tribute albums, and late-career triumphs.) This may be the only issue on which record labels and the technocrats running the digital platforms agree, despite all the superficial conflicts between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Both those adversaries also want everything as smooth as possible. And they can even summon up academic research to back up their position. When they treat songs as ‘content’ for mass entertainment, they aren’t really all that different from Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker and his reductionist claim that music is just “auditory cheesecake” for the brain, akin to a recreational drug or a six-pack of Budweiser. The very term content implies that music is something generic, a fungible commodity without social significance or larger purpose—with “no survival value,” in Pinker’s terms—except (of course!) to generate a profit for its purveyors.³

某种程度上，音乐中的人为因素甚至被视为一种障碍，尽可能地用算法来取代。事实上，音乐数字化革命的第二阶段建立在软件和数据分析的应用之上，几乎涵盖了音乐生态系统的每一个决策点。诚然，算法尽管披着高科技的外衣，但实际上不过是一个反馈回路，通过后视镜来预测未来。下周推荐给你的歌曲可能和你上周欣赏的歌曲一模一样——这很难说是一种颠覆性变革的前景，但还有什么比这更顺畅的呢？歌曲无需真正聆听就能被评估，这种想法或许会让人觉得奇怪，但对于日益主导音乐行业的高科技企业来说，这却是一个难以抗拒的诱惑。他们现在使用人工智能来创作音乐、演奏音乐、策划音乐、分析音乐的商业潜力，并最终将其出售给客户。机器人现在甚至充当着歌曲的消费者。音乐家们已经开始雇佣机器人来点击他们的在线曲目——只需299美元，你就能购买10万次收听你的音乐。在一个奇怪的自我强化过程中​​，这些“聆听”让全能的算法相信一首歌值得听力。“机器人会梦见电吉他吗？”科技记者尼克·菲尔德斯问道。如果是这样，一个完整的闭环就会出现，将音乐从创作到消费的整个过程封装起来，无需任何人类参与——这是所有商业模式中最流畅的^。4

To some extent, the human element in music is even treated as an obstacle, replaced whenever possible with an algorithm. Indeed, the second stage of the digital revolution in music is built on the application of software and data analysis at virtually every decision point in the music ecosystem. True, the algorithm, for all its high-tech sheen, is little more than a feedback loop, charting the future by looking into a rearview mirror. The songs recommended for you next week will resemble the songs you enjoyed last week—hardly a promising approach for disruptive change, but what could be smoother? The idea that songs might be evaluated without anyone actually listening to them might strike some as strange, but it’s an irresistible proposition for the high-tech enterprises that increasingly dominate the music business. They now use artificial intelligence to compose music, perform it, curate it, analyze it for commercial potential, and finally sell it to a customer. Robots even serve now as consumers of songs. Musicians are already hiring bots to click on their online tracks—for $299 you can purchase 100,000 listens for your music. In a strange self-reinforcing process, these ‘listens’ convince the all-powerful algorithms that a song is worth hearing. “Will androids dream of electric guitars?” asks tech journalist Nic Fildes. If so, a whole closed loop emerges, encapsulating music from creation to consumption, without any human being required—the smoothest business model of them all.⁴

但一旦我们将目光从好莱坞和硅谷移开，这种愿景便会崩塌。如今的歌曲依然像以往一样具有破坏性，音乐与暴力之间的联系也已无法根除。如此多的恐怖主义和大规模暴力事件都以音乐表演为目标，这绝非巧合。2017年10月1日，美国历史上最致命的大规模枪击案发生在拉斯维加斯丰收音乐节（Harvest Music Festival）上，一名枪手从酒店窗户发射了一千多发子弹，造成58人死亡，851人受伤。凶手似乎事先考察了多场音乐会，甚至预订了可以俯瞰其他音乐节的房间。就在六个月前，英国曼彻斯特一场爱莉安娜·格兰德（Ariana Grande）演唱会后发生炸弹爆炸，造成22人死亡，120人受伤。不到一年前，佛罗里达州奥兰多市的一家夜总会“脉动”（Pulse）也发生了枪击事件，造成50人死亡。七个月前，巴黎恐怖分子袭击了巴塔克兰剧院的一场摇滚音乐会，造成90人死亡，200人受伤。从印度尼西亚到瑞典，其他与音乐相关的爆炸事件也加剧了这种模式。音乐是一种强大的力量，能够激起人们最强烈的情感和暴力激情，但并不总是带来好处——就像古代军阀将音乐家带入战场一样，今天也是如此。即使企业利益将音乐包装成逃避现实的娱乐活动，夜总会也在训练他们的保镖兼任反恐专家；格莱美奖的周末庆祝活动最近就包括一场“反恐简报会”——为音乐家及其随行人员举办的全天会议，让他们为歌曲引发致命反应的那一刻做好准备。

But as soon as we turn our gaze away from Hollywood and Silicon Valley, this vision collapses. Songs are just as disruptive now as they have ever been, and the connection between music and violence has proven impossible to eradicate. It’s hardly a coincidence that so many acts of terrorism and large-scale violence are targeted at musical performances. On October 1, 2017, the deadliest mass shooting in American history took place at the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, where a gunman fired more than a thousand rounds from a hotel window, killing 58 people and leaving 851 others wounded. The killer appears to have scouted out various concerts in preparation, even reserving rooms overlooking other festivals. Just six months earlier, a bomb exploded after an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people and injuring 120 others. Less than a year before that incident, a shooter took the lives of 50 people at Pulse, a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Seven months earlier, terrorists in Paris targeted a rock concert at the Bataclan theater, killing 90 and wounding 200. Other music-related bombings, from Indonesia to Sweden, reinforce the pattern. Music is a powerful force that stirs up the most intense feelings and violent passions, but not always for good—that’s just as true today as when ancient warlords brought musicians into battle. Even as corporate interests package it as escapist entertainment, nightclubs are training their bouncers to double as terrorism experts; the weekend festivities at the Grammys recently included a “counterterrorism briefing”—a full-day session for musicians and their entourages to prepare them for those moments when songs unleash a deadly response.

对音乐的愤怒和反弹并非仅限于恐怖分子。即使在新千年，各国政府也对歌曲的力量心存畏惧。在中国，当局禁止嘻哈艺人在电视上表演。在埃及，流行歌星最近因……被判入狱。带有暗示性的音乐视频。在俄罗斯，女权朋克摇滚乐队“暴动小猫”（Pussy Riot）的成员成为抗议的焦点；她们因“破坏社会秩序”而被法院定罪。随后发起的一场旨在根除说唱音乐的运动最终未能实施，但弗拉基米尔·普京宣布了一项“领导”和“指挥”俄罗斯嘻哈音乐的后备计划——这一令人费解的声明似乎从一开始就注定要失败。在埃塞俄比亚，歌手泰迪·阿弗罗（Teddy Afro）成为该国最红的流行歌星，但他的专辑发布却被警方叫停。在泰国，一首说唱歌曲让政府如此不安，不仅以威胁和谴责作为回应，还发布了自己的音乐视频。似乎没有人告诉这些国家的统治者，音乐只是听觉上的“芝士蛋糕”。他们认为音乐具有颠覆性——而且，基于歌曲的悠久历史，他们或许是对的^。5

Anger and backlashes against music are hardly restricted to terrorists. Even in the new millennium, governments fear the power of song. In China, authorities have blocked hip-hop artists from performing on TV. In Egypt, pop stars were recently jailed for their suggestive music videos. In Russia, members of the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot have emerged as focal points for protest; they were convicted in court for “undermining the social order.” A subsequent campaign to eradicate rap music proved impossible to implement, but Vladimir Putin announced a fallback plan to “lead” and “direct” Russian hip-hop—a mystifying declaration that seems destined to failure from the start. In Ethiopia, singer Teddy Afro became the biggest pop star in the country only to have his album launch shut down by police. In Thailand, the government was so unnerved by a rap song that it responded not only with threats and denunciations, but with its own music video response. Nobody seems to have told the rulers of these nations that music is just auditory cheesecake. They see it as subversive—and, based on the long history of song, they are probably right.⁵

但音乐的颠覆性力量也常常因其积极作用而受到人们的推崇。当我与人们谈论音乐的魅力和变革力量时，我常常会遇到质疑。许多人认为这只是迷信。然而，随着时间的推移，音乐的魔力得到了科学的进一步验证，并被许多领域富有远见的实践者付诸实践。体育教练已经发现，将音乐播放列表的节奏与运动员的心跳同步可以提高耐力、速度和运动表现。心理学家已经证明，参加音乐会和舞蹈活动的人在各种指标上得分更高，他们对人际关系、社区和人生道路的满足感更高。越来越多的证据证实，音乐可以改变人体化学反应，提高T细胞水平，增强人体免疫系统。事实上，医生们最热衷于利用音乐来提升自身表现：90%的外科医生在手术室里播放音乐——摇滚乐是他们最喜欢的音乐类型——人们普遍认为，音乐可以提高他们的注意力，改善手术效果。在某些情况下，手术器械本身就是高科技乐器，可以运用声波来治疗从白内障到肾结石的各种疾病。奥菲斯用里拉琴治病，而现代医生依靠碎石机，但在这两种情况下，声波能量都是他们魔法的源泉。

But music’s disruptive force is just as often embraced for its positive effects. When I talk to people about music’s powers of enchantment and transformation, I often encounter skeptical responses. That’s just superstition, many believe. Yet with each passing year, the magic of music is further validated by science and implemented by visionary practitioners in a host of fields. Sports trainers have learned that syncing the tempo of a music playlist to an athlete’s heartbeat can improve stamina, speed, and performance. Psychologists have proven that people who attend concerts and dance events score higher on a wide range of metrics, finding greater satisfaction in their relationships, communities, and life paths. A growing body of evidence confirms that music alters body chemistry, increasing T-cell levels and strengthening the body’s immune system. In fact, doctors have been the most enthusiastic in embracing music as a tool in enhancing their own performance: 90 percent of surgeons play music in the operating room—rock is the favored genre—and there’s a widespread belief that songs improve their concentration and procedure results. In some instances, the surgical tools themselves are high-tech musical instruments, applying sound waves to counter everything from cataracts to kidney stones. Orpheus healed with a lyre while the modern doctor relies on a lithotripter, but in both instances sonic power is the source of their wizardry.

即使在私密的家中，我们也相信歌曲的催化作用。社会学家蒂娅·德诺拉（Tia DeNora）研究人们如何准备浪漫约会和亲密时刻时，她发现几乎每个人都坚信音乐是爱情和性爱中不可或缺的转化力量。合适的音乐伴奏总是能促成爱情的升华。“这是一种神奇而神秘的东西，”一位女士在谈到她为一场浪漫邂逅选择的背景音乐时解释道——这几乎与参与者用来描述我们祖先充满歌曲的生育仪式的词语如出一辙。越来越多的研究支持这些观点，表明音乐不仅能催人入眠，甚至在性爱中伴着合适的播放列表时，还能增强愉悦感^。6

Even in the privacy of our homes, we trust in the catalytic capabilities of song. When sociologist Tia DeNora studied how people prepare for romantic dates and intimate moments, she learned that almost everyone places enormous faith in music as a transformative force in love and sex. The right musical accompaniment is invariably enlisted to seal the deal. “It’s a kind of magical, mystical type thing,” explained one woman, when discussing her choice of background music for an amorous encounter—almost the same words a participant would have used to describe the song-filled fertility rituals of our ancestors. A growing body of research supports these views, showing that music not only brings couples to bed but even enhances pleasure when sex is accompanied by the right playlist.⁶

事实上，音乐或许是我们最可靠的春药。但它的功效在卧室之外的许多其他场合也得到了证实，即使在高科技时代，似乎每个人类的需求或愿望都有相应的应用程序或药丸。约翰·斯洛博达是一位专门研究音乐融入日常生活的心理学家，他在数十项研究中证明，人们几乎以所有可以想象到的方式将歌曲作为改变的推动者。在一项实验中，参与者在一天中的随机时刻被打断，并被要求记录他们最近的活动。在44%的实验中，音乐参与其中，但几乎从未被用作娱乐或消遣——相反，歌曲被融入到各种各样的活动中，由于其听觉元素，这些活动参与者的热情更高，也更成功。参与者在这些活动中“更加积极、更加警觉、更加专注于当下”，这些活动涵盖了极其广泛的领域，包括运动健身、写作和案头工作、通勤和旅行、跑腿办事、家务、冥想、恢复和疗愈、规划未来活动、洗漱和穿衣、阅读和学习、烹饪、进食、睡觉、散步，以及几乎所有你能想到的其他活动。人们一次又一次地报告说，“当他们在这些时刻播放歌曲时，他们“积极、兴奋和关注”——不需要药物或处方^。7

Music may, in fact, be our most reliable aphrodisiac. But its efficacy is validated in many other settings outside the bedroom, even in a high-tech age when there’s seemingly an app or pill for each human need or desire. John Sloboda, a psychologist specializing in the integration of music into day-to-day life, has proven in dozens of research studies that people employ songs as change agents in almost every conceivable manner. In one experiment, participants were interrupted at random moments in their day and asked to document their most recent activities. In 44 percent of these instances, music was involved, but almost never as entertainment or diversion—instead, songs were integrated into a variety of activities, which were pursued with greater vigor and success because of the aural ingredient. Participants were “more positive, more alert, and more focused on the present” in these engagements, which encompassed an extraordinary range of pursuits, including sports and fitness, writing and desk work, commuting and travel, running errands, housekeeping, meditating, recovery and healing, planning future events, washing and getting dressed, reading and study, cooking, eating, sleeping, walking, and almost any other activity you can name. Again and again, people reported “greater positivity, arousal, and attention” when they employed songs in these moments—no pill or prescription required.⁷

因此，我们面临着一个悖论。两种不同的音乐理念蓬勃发展，它们似乎互不相容。一方面，我们遇到了强大的利益集团，他们希望音乐存在于娱乐产业可预测的公式中——而这些公式越来越多地体现在算法中，这些算法承诺消除音乐消费中的所有困难和障碍。人工智能将挑选完美的歌曲，适应你的心情、品味和生活方式。任何不和谐或破坏性的东西都无法侵入你自给自足的音乐生态系统，科技公司更愿意将其设想为一个单人栖息地，一个连接到数字设备的个人。在一个追求流畅美学的时代，没有什么比这更流畅的了。与此同时，音乐的现实生活抵制了这种简化的过程，这种以利润为导向的将歌曲打包成商业化的微交易，针对的是那些容易接受、精准定义的受众。相反，人们坚持以意想不到的、不羁的方式使用音乐，挖掘其多样化的能量，其中许多能量是难以商品化的。有时，这种力量如同黑暗魔法，危险而不可控。有时，它又令人振奋，充满正能量，真正改变人生。每一个权力掮客——独裁统治者、宗教领袖，甚至是Facebook和谷歌的技术官僚——都承认这一事实。他们想要控制音乐，并利用其力量来谋取私利。但他们也惧怕音乐，因为他们知道，颠覆性或革命性的运动可能会让这些歌曲反过来攻击他们。

So we are faced with a paradox. Two different visions of music flourish, and they seem incompatible. On the one hand, we encounter powerful interests who want music to exist within the predictable formulas of the entertainment industry—and those formulas are increasingly embodied in algorithms that promise to remove all difficulty and obstacles from music consumption. Artificial intelligence will pick the perfect song, adapted to your mood, taste, and lifestyle. Nothing discordant or disruptive will intrude on your self-contained music ecosystem, which tech companies prefer to envision as a single-person habitat, an individual connected to a digital device. In an age that aspires to an aesthetics of smoothness, nothing could be smoother. At the same time, the lived reality of music resists this whole reductionist process, this profit-driven imperative to package songs for commerce in micro-transactions targeted at a receptive, finely defined audience. Instead, people insist on putting music to use in unexpected and unruly ways, tapping into its diverse energies, many of them resistant to commodification. Sometimes that potency is a dark magic, dangerous and uncontrollable. In other cases, it is uplifting and positive, truly life-changing. Every power broker—authoritarian rulers, religious leaders, technocrats at Facebook and Google—acknowledges this truth. They want to control music, and use its power to advance their own interests. But they also fear it, knowing that disruptive or revolutionary movements can turn the songs against them.

所以，任你选择：音乐是抚慰人心的生活方式配件，还是颠覆性的变革力量？但这始终是你的最终选择。这两种观点之间的冲突，一直是人类歌曲整个历史演变的引擎。即使我们自认为已经进入了音乐纯粹娱乐的幸福时代，一个颠覆性的新时代通常也近在咫尺——机器人和人工智能终将无力阻止。但当歌曲的这场新革命到来时，它撼动社会的力量终将昙花一现。它最终会……合法化和主流化，并被那些曾经反对它的机构所采纳。歌曲将被重新利用，因为背景故事会被改写以适应新的议程。所以，做出你的选择，挑选你的音乐，但不要太安于现状。几乎可以肯定，已经有一些歌曲——构成音乐史的无数个大爆炸中的又一个大爆炸——将重新开启这个过程。

So take your pick: music as soothing lifestyle accessory, or music as subversive force of change. But that’s always been the choice. The conflict between these two visions has served as the engine of change throughout the entire history of human song. Even when we believe we have arrived at a blissful age of music as pure entertainment, a new era of disruption is usually waiting just around the corner—and robots and artificial intelligence will prove incapable of stopping it. But when that new revolution in song arrives, its power to shake up society is short-lived. It will eventually get legitimized and mainstreamed, adopted by the same institutions that previously fought against it. Songs will be repurposed as the backstory is rewritten to fit a new agenda. So make your choice and pick your music, but don’t get too comfortable with it. There’s almost certainly some song already out there—another big bang in that endless series of big bangs constituting music history—that will start the process all over again.

结语

EPILOGUE

这不是一份宣言

This Is Not a Manifesto

我不喜欢宣言。我意识到，乍一看，下面列出的四十条戒律似乎只是宣言的一个例子。但这并非宣言——宣言并非试图将一种信仰体系强加于世。这份清单恰恰相反：这些是音乐强加于我的信仰之上的真理。

I dislike manifestos. And I realize that the list of forty precepts below appears, at first glance, to be just another example of one. But this is not a manifesto—which is an attempt to impose a belief system on the world. This list represents the reverse: these are the truths that music imposed on my beliefs.

我从未刻意去探究它们。它们也从未成为我构建并验证的假设。它们强行占据了我的注意力，在我的研究和学习过程中，它们以强烈的张力不断显现，迫使我对其唯命是从。它们是我多年来努力追溯人类历史上歌曲的精髓和演变，才逐渐领悟的指导原则。

I never sought them out. They were never hypotheses I formulated and tested. They forced themselves onto my attention, requiring my allegiance by the vehemence with which they asserted themselves during the course of my research and studies. They are guiding principles that I only came to grasp gradually, over a period of years, as a result of my efforts to trace the essence and evolution of songs in human history.

几乎在每一个例子中，理解这些戒律都迫使我改变自己的信念。从这个意义上来说，它们应该被视为一种反宣言，或者说，是残酷现实对理论领域的一种入侵。它们也可以作为将本书的核心知识应用于其他情境的基础。

In almost every instance, understanding these precepts forced me to alter my beliefs. To that degree, they ought to be deemed an anti-manifesto, or a kind of intrusion of brute reality on the realm of theory. They can also serve as a foundation for efforts to apply the core learnings from this book in other contexts.

1. 音乐是人类生活中变革的推动者，是变革和魅力的力量。

1. Music is a change agent in human life, a force of transformation and enchantment.

2. 音乐的普遍性，就如同人类拥有相似的需要、渴望、生物本能以及行为的进化要求一样。拒绝承认一个群体音乐的普遍性，就等于否认其属于更广泛的人类群体。

2. Music is universal to the same extent that people have comparable needs, aspirations, biological imperatives, and evolutionary demands on their behavior. Refusing to acknowledge the universal qualities in a community’s music is akin to denying it membership in the broader human community.

3. 歌曲是我们现在所说的心理学的起源——换句话说，早在内心生活在社会其他领域被认为值得尊重之前，歌曲就是一种庆祝个人情感和态度的方式。

3. Songs served as the origin for what we now call psychology—in other words, as a way of celebrating personal emotions and attitudes long before the inner life was deemed worthy of respect in other spheres of society.

4. 几个世纪以来，歌曲自由与言论自由同等重要，而且往往更具争议性——人们担心音乐本身就具有强大的说服力。歌曲往往在政客愿意宣扬之前就已蕴含着危险的新思想。

4. Over the centuries, freedom of song has been just as important as freedom of speech, and often far more controversial—feared because of music’s inherent power of persuasion. Songs frequently embody dangerous new ideas long before any politician is willing to speak them.

5. 畅销歌曲排行榜可以解读为社会领先指标的指数。明天社会发生的事，今天就能在收音机里听到。

5. Charts of best-selling songs can be read as an index of leading social indicators. What happens in society tomorrow can be heard on the radio today.

6. 对于没有半导体和宇宙飞船的社群来说，音乐就是他们的科技。例如，歌曲是所有早期文化的“云存储”，保存着社群的历史、传统和生存技能。歌曲也可以作为武器、药物、工具，或以其他方式发挥其内在潜能。

6. For communities that don’t have semiconductors and spaceships, music is their technology. For example, songs served as the ‘cloud storage’ for all early cultures, preserving communal history, traditions, and survival skills. Songs can also function as weapons, medicine, tools, or in other capacities that channel their inherent potency.

7. 技术的每一次重大变革都会改变人们的唱歌方式。

7. Each major shift in technology changes the way people sing.

8. 音乐创新几乎总是来自外来者——奴隶、波西米亚人、叛逆者和其他被排除在权力之外的人——因为他们对他们所处社会的主流风俗和态度。这不可避免地导致了新的音乐表达方式的产生。

8. Musical innovations almost always come from outsiders—slaves, bohemians, rebels, and others excluded from positions of power—because they have the least allegiance to the prevailing manners and attitudes of the societies in which they live. This inevitably results in new modes of musical expression.

9. 多样性有助于音乐创新，因为它将外来者带入音乐生态系统。想想从莱斯博斯岛到利物浦的港口城市和多元文化社区如何在歌曲史上扮演着如此关键的角色。

9. Diversity contributes to musical innovation because it brings the outsider into the music ecosystem. Consider how port cities and multicultural communities, from Lesbos to Liverpool, have played such a key role in the history of song.

10. 音乐创新像病毒一样传播，通常通过相同的方式——通过来自不同地方的群体之间的密切接触。歌曲“病毒式传播”的概念不仅仅是一个诗意的隐喻。新的音乐方式往往出现在不健康的城市（例如代尔麦地那、新奥尔良等）。

10. Musical innovation spreads like a virus, and usually by the same means—through close contact between groups from different places. The concept of a song going viral is more than just a poetic metaphor. New approaches to music often arise in unhealthy cities (Deir el-Medina, New Orleans, etc.).

11. 如果当局不干预，音乐往往会扩大个人自主权和人类自由。

11. If authorities do not intervene, music tends to expand personal autonomy and human freedom.

12. 当局通常会进行干预。

12. Authorities usually intervene.

13. 短期来看，统治者和机构的力量远大于音乐家。但长期来看，歌曲的力量往往能够战胜哪怕是最专制的领导人。

13. Over the short term, rulers and institutions are more powerful than musicians. In the long term, songs tend to prevail over even the most authoritarian leaders.

14. 国王和其他统治阶级成员很少能为音乐领域的突破做出贡献。当这类创新被归因于一位强大的领导者时——例如《雅歌》、《诗经》、格里高利圣咏、吟游诗人的歌词等等——这通常表明一些重要的东西被隐藏在我们的视野之外。

14. Kings and other members of the ruling class are rarely responsible for breakthroughs in music. When such innovations are attributed to a powerful leader—as with the Song of Songs, the Shijing, Gregorian chant, troubadour lyrics, and so on—this is usually a sign that something important has been hidden from our view.

15. 我们仍然需要研究音乐史上这些强大的人物，不是因为他们做了什么，而是他们隐藏了什么。

15. We still need to study these powerful figures in music history, not for what they did, but for what they hid.

16. 未被书写（或被抹去或扭曲）的历史是衡量他们干预是否成功的标准。记录中的空白历史往往是权力的展现。正因如此，那些与既定叙事相悖的零散事实才值得我们密切关注。

16. The unwritten (or erased or distorted) history is a measure of their successful intervention. Gaps in the documented history are often demonstrations of power. This is why stray and isolated facts that run counter to the sanctioned narrative deserve our closest attention.

17. 尽可能地追溯原始或早期的资料。如果有人坚持认为你可以无视某个原始资料或传统传说，那可能表明你应该认真对待。

17. Whenever possible, try to go back to original or early sources. If someone insists that you can safely ignore a primary source or traditional lore, that’s probably a sign you should take it seriously.

18. 音乐史上没有什么比一段稳定时期更不稳定了。表演风格出现新的突破，通常意味着一切进展顺利。

18. Nothing is more unstable in music history than a period of stability. The signal for new disruption in performance styles is usually that things are going smoothly.

19. 大约在毕达哥拉斯和孔子的时代，发生了一场认识论上的断裂，试图将魔法和恍惚状态从可接受的音乐实践中移除。这一议程注定会失败——你无法将音乐简化为纯粹理性的规则（或如今通常称之为算法）——但它的倡导者从未放弃尝试。我们至今仍生活在毕达哥拉斯断裂的后遗症之中。

19. Around the time of Pythagoras and Confucius, an epistemological rupture took place that attempted to remove magic and trance from the sphere of acceptable music practices. This agenda is always doomed to failure—you can’t reduce music to purely rational rules (or algorithms, as they are usually called nowadays)—but its advocates never give up trying. We are still living with the after-effects of the Pythagorean rupture today.

20. 两种互不相容的观点——音乐究竟是由音符构成，还是由声音构成——的争论仍在持续。关于模拟音乐与数字音乐的争论只是这场冲突的最新体现。它也可以被描述为欧洲传统与非洲传统的对立，以及其他许多方面的对立。在某种程度上，这是所有音乐学的根本矛盾。

20. The battle continues to rage over two incompatible views: whether music is constructed from notes or from sounds. The arguments over analog versus digital music are just the latest manifestation of this conflict. It can also be described as an opposition between European and African traditions, and in many other ways. To some degree, this is the fundamental tension in all musicology.

21. 音乐远不止音符。它是由声音构成的。混淆这两者并非易事。

21. Music is always more than notes. It is made out of sounds. Confusing these two is not a small matter.

22. 音乐声音存在于自然界中，作为创造或破坏的力量（有时是潜在的，有时是已经存在的）早在人类社会运用其力量之前，音乐就已经实现了。因此，五声音阶、五度圈、功能和声等等并非由音乐家发明，而是由他们发现的——就像微积分的发现一样。

22. Musical sounds existed in the natural world as creative or destructive forces (sometimes latent, other times already actualized) long before human societies put their power to use. As such, the pentatonic scale, circle of fifths, functional harmony, etc. were not invented by musicians, but discovered by them—much like calculus was discovered.

23. 作品中反复出现的结构和模式值得分析，但音乐不能被简化为一门纯科学或某种应用数学。情感、个性和刻意颠覆的强大特质，抵制着这种规范化。即使在最严格、最控制的环境中，这些元素依然存在——而且，如果有机会，它们将占据主导地位。

23. The recurring structures and patterns in compositions invite analysis, yet music cannot be reduced to a pure science or a type of applied mathematics. Powerful aspects of emotion, personality, and deliberate subversion resist this kind of codification. Even in the most restrictive and controlling environments, these elements persist—and, if given the chance, will dominate.

24. 我们可以从神经科学中了解音乐，但音乐并非产生于大脑。音乐存在于现实世界。

24. We can learn about music from neuroscience, but music does not happen in the brain. Music takes place in the world.

25. 历史记载往往更多地告诉我们合法化和主流化的过程，而不是音乐创新的实际来源和起源。

25. Historical accounts often tell us more about the process of legitimization and mainstreaming than about the actual sources and origins of musical innovation.

26. 圈内人试图改写历史，以掩盖圈外人的重要性，或者将圈外人重新定义为圈内人。

26. Insiders try to rewrite history to obscure the importance of outsiders—or to redefine the outsider as an insider.

27. 合法化过程本身就需要扭曲——

27. The very process of legitimization requires distortion—

掩盖起源并重新利用音乐来满足当权者的需求。

obscuring origins and repurposing music to meet the needs of those in positions of power.

28. 合法化是持续不断且不断累积的。换句话说，音乐史与其他类型的历史并无二致：每一代人都会根据自己的优先考虑事项进行改写，而真相往往被置于次要位置。

28. Legitimization is ongoing and cumulative. In other words, music history is no different from other types of history: each generation rewrites it to match its own priorities, of which truth-telling often ranks low on the list.

29. 合法化过程通常需要二十五到五十年的时间，或者我们称之为一代人的时间。加速主流化的尝试节奏更快的激进音乐（例如，为了赚钱）会将难以化解的紧张局势推向表面。有时甚至会造成人员死亡。

29. The process of legitimization typically transpires over a period of between twenty-five and fifty years—or what we might call a generation. Attempts to accelerate the mainstreaming of radical music at a faster pace (e.g., in order to make money from it) will bring irresolvable tensions to the surface. Sometimes people will die as a result.

30. 音乐始终与性和暴力联系在一起。最早的乐器上沾满了鲜血。最早的歌曲颂扬着生育、狩猎、战争等等。音乐史的大部分内容都是为了掩盖这些联系，压制那些被后世视为可耻或有损尊严的元素。

30. Music has always been linked to sex and violence. The first instruments were dripping in blood. The first songs promoted fertility, hunting, warfare, and the like. Most of music history serves to obscure these connections and to suppress elements judged shameful or undignified by posterity.

31. 音乐史上那些“可耻”的元素——性、迷信、血腥冲突、精神错乱等等——通常与创新过程本身息息相关。如果我们将这些元素从历史记录中剔除，就等于无视新的音乐创作方式是如何诞生的。

31. The ‘shameful’ elements in music history—sex, superstition, bloody conflicts, altered mind states, etc.—are usually closely linked to the process of innovation itself. When we cleanse them from the historical record, we guarantee our ignorance of how new ways of music-making arise.

32. 即使是情歌，也同样是政治歌曲，因为新的爱情歌唱方式往往会威胁现状。所有权威人物，从父母到君主，都暗自意识到了这种威胁，即使他们无法用语言清晰地表达出来。

32. Even love songs are political songs, because new ways of singing about love tend to threaten the status quo. All authority figures, from parents to monarchs, grasp this threat implicitly, even if they can’t express it clearly in words.

33. 机构和企业并不创造音乐创新；他们只是在事后才认识到这一点。

33. Institutions and businesses do not create musical innovations; they just recognize them after the fact.

34. 他们通常会努力隐藏这一点——目的是夸大自己的重要性——有时甚至会成功。

34. They usually strive to hide this—with the goal of exaggerating their own importance—and sometimes succeed.

35. 如果你真的想了解当今的音乐，那就不要只关注舞台，而要研究观众。

35. If you really want to understand music in the present day, turn away from the stage and study the audience.

36. 音乐曾经融入人们的生活；如今，它却投射出人们的生活方式。这看似细微的差别，但两者之间的差距，却如同现实与幻想之间的鸿沟般巨大。

36. Music was once embedded in a person’s life; now it projects a person’s lifestyle. That may seem like a small difference, but the distance between the two can be as large as the gap between reality and fantasy.

37. 音乐能娱乐大众，但它绝不能沦为单纯的娱乐。

37. Music entertains, but it can never be reduced to mere entertainment.

38. 观众从来不是被动的，他们总是让音乐发挥作用。

38. The audience is never passive, and it always puts music to use.

39. 歌曲依然拥有魔力，即使对于那些已经忘记如何利用它的人来说也是如此。

39. Songs still possess magic, even for those who have forgotten how to tap into it.

40. 那些以音乐为职业的人——无论是作为表演者、教师、学者还是其他身份——可以忽略这种魔力，也可以在恢复其潜能的过程中发挥作用。换句话说：有了音乐，我们都能成为魔法师。

40. Those who devote themselves to music as a vocation—whether as performer, teacher, scholar, or in some other capacity—can ignore this magic, or they can play a part in restoring its potency. In other words: with music, we can all be wizards.